BANCROFT LIBRARY THE 1 [BRARY 'HE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA cThe French in the Mississippi Valley and Spanish explorations and colonization; excerpt from v. 2 of A popular history of the United States, by William Cullen Bryant and Sydney Howard Ga 3 cNew York, C. Scribner's son cl878a 1681.] WILLIAM PENN. to produce." Penn's retorts were so sharp that the tolerably well disposed Mayor ordered him into the bail-dock, a felon's dirty place in the purlieus of the court room ; and Mead conducted himself with such steadiness that he soon followed. The jury, though vigorously bullied by the Recorder, brought in the simple verdict, " Guilty of speaking in Grace Church Street." Sent out again, they soon returned with the same verdict. But this did not suit the court. The jury was shut up and watched overnight, without meat, drink, fire, or any Trial of William Penn. other accommodation. The next morning it returned the same ver dict. Again it was angrily sent out, only to return with the original verdict. This happened twice more, the trial lasting till September fifth, and Penn and Mead being transferred to Newgate Avhile it was pending, and the oostinate jury being shut up without food or drink. When at last the original verdict was rendered, each juror was fined forty marks for following his own opinion, and Penn and Mead sent to Newgate till each paid his forty marks for having his hat reset b 486 COLONIZATION BY FRIENDS. [HAP. XX. upon his head. Such was the tolerated spite and injustice of that interval of persecution. 1 Soon after the trial at the Old Bailey, Penn's father died, as it ap pears under great concern of mind at a tardy recognition of his son's courage and virtue. After taking the final leave of the household, Death of the ^ e sa ^ : " S n William, I charge you do nothing against your conscience : if you and your friends keep to your plain way of preaching, and keep to your plain way of living, you will make an end of the priests, to the end of the world." In 1671, Penn was again in Newgate for six months for being pres ent at a Friends' meeting. After his release, he went on a religious mission to Holland and Germany, with Robert Barclay, author of the famous " Apology," and George Fox. His interviews with the sus ceptible Princess Elizabeth of Germany are memorable in the annals of Quakerism. Among the effects of his father, Penn had inherited a claim against Penn's claim * ne Crown f or arrears of the Admiral's pay, and for various crown*. th loans to the Admiralty. What with principal and interest, HIS proposal. it amounte d i n 1681 to 16,000, a sum which, in the money value of to-day, would be a very large one. Penn proposed to the government to liquidate this debt by a grant to him of terri tory in America. Those members of the Privy Council who were hostile to the views of Quakerism relative to the Church and State, strongly opposed the grant. But even the Duke of York, with whom he had been lately in controversy, favored his petition, mindful per haps of the Admiral's great service to him in the tight pinch of the naval battle. The Duke might have preferred to extend his own province of New York farther to the southward. Penn was well skilled in the methods of courts, and knew when to wait, when to persist, how smoothly to deal with the men of influence, in order to prefer his claim. The treasury also was empty, and the King thought he would be well rid of a debt of 16,000 for many square miles of wilderness peopled only by Indians. The Lords' Com mittee of Colonies, the Board of Trade, were quite contemptuous 1 Eighty years later, on June 7, 1753, a Quakeress managed to get into the House of Lords, and reprehended the Peers on account of some fashionable excesses in dress and amusements. The Monthly Review said : " She was indulged with the attention of the House." During the French Revolution, a Quaker preferred to keep on his hat in the tribune when he was present at a sitting of the Council of Ancients. It was the Presi dent's opinion that the Council, by allowing him to remain with it on, would give a proof of its respect for the freedom of religious opinions. But the order of the day was carried upon a very sensible remark by Rousseau, who said : " He may come with his coat but toned after the fashion of the Quakers, if he pleases, but let him take off his hat or stay away. If the delicacy of his conscience cannot yield to his curiosity, let him make his curiosity yield to the delicacy of his conscience." 1681.] THE GRANT OF PENNSYLVANIA. 487 over the idea of establishing over Indians, and amid foreign rivalries, a set of non-resistants. But a very cogent address in Council by Penn's chief advocate, clearing up the anti-governmental, anti-priest, and anti-royal principles of the Friends, prevailed. Chief Justice North was appointed to draw up a charter, with specifications of boundaries, which was signed March 4, 1681. In considera tion of two beaver-skins annually, and a fifth part of all the of Pennsyi- gold and silver that might be mined, the King granted to Penn a territory of forty thousand square miles. This monarch was nothing if not merry ; he must be allowed his sport. " Here," said he, " I am doing well in granting all these coasts, seas, bays, etc., to such a fighting man as you are. But you must promise not to take to scalping. And will you practise entire toleration toward all mem bers of the Church of England ? " To which, of course, Penn readily assented. As regards the scalping, a striking decline from the prin ciples of his father was shown by the grandson of Penn, who pro claimed in July, 1764, that for every male Indian above the age of ten who was captured, a bounty of $150 should be paid ; for every male killed and scalped, $134 ; for every one thus served under ten, $130 ; for every female killed and scalped, $50. But Penn's descend ants had then long ceased to be Friends, and the frontier influence of the French among the Indians was of the most murderous kind. The King had called the new territory, thus granted, Pennsylvania. But Penn, whose family originated in Wales, had intended to call it New Wales. In the conference with the Secre- territory tary, who handed him the charter, he objected to the King's designation, and tried to prevail upon the Secretary to substitute his own, even offering him, when he proved stubborn, twenty guineas to alter it. But the Secretary could not overcome his sense of duty. Upon referring the matter to the King, with the compromise of Syl- vania, the King said, " No. I am godfather to the territory, and will bestow its name." Penn's proprietary jurisdiction thus made secure, he issued a far- sighted and liberal advertisement of the inducements for emigration, which particularly addressed the Quaker dispo- PM*^** sition. His scheme of administration is too long to repro- emigrante - duce entire : but two or three special traits of it deserve emphasis. He declared that he wished to establish a just and righteous govern ment in his province, that others might take example by it. In Eng land there was not room for such a holy experiment. Government is a part of religion itself, a thing sacred in its institution and end. Any government is free to the people under it, whatever be the frame, where the laws rule, and the people are a party to those laws. Gov- 488 COLONIZATION BY FRIENDS. [CHAP. XX. ernments depend upon men, not men upon governments. The first principle of Penn's new code recognized liberty of conscience ; all persons acknowledging the one Eternal God, living peaceably and justly, were not to be molested or prejudiced in matters of faith and worship. Penn went further than this ; with the sad example of New Eng land experience in his thought, he added that nobody shall be com pelled at any time to frequent or maintain any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever. Only murder and treason were to be punishable by death. That, at least, was insisted upon by Chief Jus tice North. But while Penn lived, no gallows was erected in his province. He said that a prison must be converted into a school of reformation and education ; that litigation ought to give way to some regularly appointed arbitration ; that an oath was a superfluity ; so, also, were cock-pits, bull-baiting, card-playing, theatres, and drunken ness. Lying was punishable as a crime. This, indeed, went to the root of the matter, for all nations from the earliest times have acknowl edged that a lie is the parent of a horde of vices. Trial by jury was established, and in all cases which involved an Indian, the jury must be composed of six whites and six natives, and whenever a planter conceived that he was injured in person or property by a native he must not take the law into his own hands, but apply to a magistrate, and the latter must confer with the native's sachem. The person of the Indian was declared to be sacred. Penn advertised the land in his province at forty shillings per hundred acres, and even servants could hold fifty acres in fee simple. " Still," said he to the Friends, eager to enter upon their new homes, " let no one move rashly, but have an eye to the Providence of God." So great was his reputation in Europe that he attracted many emi grants from its countries, mainly from Germany, and recruited from the soberest and thriftiest kind. A German Company, under the guidance of Franz Pastorius, 1 bought fifteen thousand acres. Three vessels came over in 1681. One of them was frozen in at Early set- Chester, and the passengers could get no further. They tiew. were obliged to dig caves in the river bank and live in them. This was a common expedient with the earliest settlers, and at a later period Penn complained of the liquor drinking and excesses in the caves. It had always been his object to live in his province and manage his affairs. When the ship in which he intended to embark 1 See a German pamphlet in the library of Harvard College, by Fr. Daniel Pastorius, " a geographical statistical Description of the Province of Pennsylvania." It contains the events which occurred from 1683 to 1699. At the time of writing it he was chief magis trate at Germantown. 1G82.] PENN'S VOYAGE. 489 was nearly ready, he requested an audience of the King. Said Charles, "It will not be long before I hear that you have Penn and gone into the savages' war kettle : what is to prevent it?" theKm s- " Their own inner light," said Penn. " Moreover, as I intend equitably to buy their lands, I shall not be molested." " Buy their lands ! Why, is not the whole land mine?" "No, your majesty, we have no right to their lands ; they are the original occupants of the soil." " What ! have I not the right of discovery ? " " Well, just suppose that a canoe full of savages should by some accident discover Great Britain. Would you vacate or sell?" The King was astonished at the retort, and no less at the policy which soon bore such admirable Chester, Pennsylvania. fruit that was unfertilized by blood. New England began by trying to convert the Indian, taking in the mean time his land in the name of the Gospel. Penn began by paying for the land and solemnly treating with the Indian that he might thus possibly convert him. After his visit to the King, Penn passed a day with his family at Worminghurst, engaged in devout exercises and domestic converse. He left there a truly Christian document in the form of a letter to his family, which was at the same time an address to all who professed the opinions of Friends. On September 1, 1682, he set sail in the ship Welcome, a name as propitious as May- voyage to .. .. .* America. flower, with a hundred passengers, nearly all or whom were Friends from his own county of Sussex. Robert Greenaway 490 COLONIZATION BY FRIENDS. [CHAP. XX. was the commander. The uncomfortable voyage lasted six weeks, during which thirty of the passengers died of the small-pox. One day the captain saw a ship which appeared to be in pursuit of his own, and took her to be an enemy. He made every preparation for resistance, and manned his guns. Then addressing the non.-resistant Quakers, he advised them to take refuge in the cabin. Penn and the rest did so, excepting James Logan, his private secretary. Logan stayed on deck and took his station at a gun. When the strange sail came near it proved to be a friendly one. Penn came on deck and severely rebuked Logan for remaining to fight. Said Logan, " I being thy secretary, why didst thou not order me to come down? But thou wert willing enough that I should stay and help to fight the ship when thou thought there was danger." At length the Delaware was reached, and a landing was made at The landing Newcastle on the 27th of October. The Dutch and Swedes SasuT" S ave th heartiest welcome to their new Governor. His first act was to naturalize all these inhabitants of the prov ince. They were summoned to the court-house and addressed by Penn on the true nature and functions of government. The commis sions of all the existing magistrates were renewed. Then he went up the river to Upland, now Chester, and met the delegates who had been already selected by his Commissioners to compose the first As sembly. Their first session, held in the Friends' Meeting House, lasted only four days, much time being saved by the admirable rule which was adopted, that " none speak but once before the question is put, nor after, but once ; and that none fall from the matter to the person, and that superfluous and tedious speeches may be stopped by the Speaker." So the Quaker principle of freedom of utterance as the spirit prompted, was judiciously balanced. No four days of Plenty and legislative work were ever more harmoniously spent in lay- p^Myi- ym m g tne foundations of society. Penn's own sincere tem per was imparted to all. " As to outward things we are satisfied ; the land good, the air clear and sweet, the springs plentiful, and provision good and easy to come at ; an innumerable quantity of wild-fowl and fish ; in fine, here is what an Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would be well contented with." l 1 The wild turkeys sometimes turned the scale at forty-six pounds ; one of thirty pounds sold for a shilling, a deer for two shillings. One settler bought a fat buck for two gills of gunpowder. Wild pigeons could be killed with sticks, apparently too numerous to get out of the way. Six rock-cod cost twelve pence, salt fish three farthings' a pound. " Peaches by cart-loads," said one letter writer : " the Indians bring us seven or eight fat bucks a day. Without rod or net we catch abundance of herrings, after the Indian manner, in penfolds." There were plenty of swans, and oysters six inches long. But all this was true of nearly all the more southern settlements in the earlier years. 1682.] PHILADELPHIA FOUNDED. 491 In good years the farmer gathered twenty or thirty bushels of wheat for every one he sowed. A native grape grew in great abundance, and yielded an excellent wine. The woods and meadows swarmed with all kinds of wild berries ; and the settlers soon had their various fruit trees and bushes, melons planted, their presses started, and perry, cider, etc., running from them. The natives were always hospitable, well inclined to barter because never overreached. Great plenty ruled in this province from the beginning. If the Dutch and Swedes had suffered from hunger and want on the banks of the Dela ware, it was their own fault. 1 At first Penn instructed his Commissioners who came in Penn's Address at Newcastle. , to examine the neighborhood of Upland to find a suitable site for a town ; but when he went up the river he pitched upon Phi i adelph i a the broad peninsula that lay between the Delaware and the founded - Schuylkill. Here he projected a city upon a great scale of squares, streets with avenues of trees some of which still preserve the names 1 A planter, writing before 1696, gave the following rates of wages : Carpenters, brick layers, and masons, six shillings a day ; shoemakers, two shillings on each pair ; journey men tailors, twelve shillings a week and their diet ; weavers, ten pence a yard ; wool-comb ers, twelve pence a pound ; potters, sixteen pence for a pot which cost in England only four pence ; brick makers, twenty shillings per thousand of bricks at the kiln ; hatters, seven shillings for a hat ; all other trades, of which every conceivable kind was pursued in the province, making it quite independent of the mother country, were rewarded in the same proportion. All kinds of food were much cheaper than in England ; and the Barbadoes furnished a constant market for corn. Laboring men earned fourteen pounds a year, with meat, drink, washing, and lodging ; maid-servants ten pounds a year. Floating mills for grinding corn took advantage of the river's current, and on the land horse-mills were used. 492 COLONIZATION BY FRIENDS. of the original trees and houses to be surrounded with gardens. Before houses could be built the settlers lived in huts, and in caves which were excavations in the river bank arched over with branches and sodded. The chimneys were built of clay strengthened with grass. One house was in process of building by a man with the happy name of Guest. Penn's first landing was made at Dock Creek opposite this unfinished house, which was afterwards known as the Blue Anchor Tavern. The first keeper of the tavern was Guest, and a long line of hospitable Friends succeeded him. Beyond Guest's house, ten others were soon built in the old English fashion, of frames ,_i^K*W. , >"V^**' Letitia Cottage, Philadelphia, supposed First Residence of Penn. filled in with brick, and called " Budd's Long Row." The tavern "was but about twelve feet front," says Watson in his copious " Annals," " on Front Street, and about twenty-two feet on Dock Street, having a ceiling of about eight and a half feet in height," A little cottage, built by one Drinker, who settled on this site alone several years before the arrival of Penn, was the first habitation on the site of Philadelphia. Penn meant to convey to the settlers by the name of his new city the disposition which he hoped would pre vail within its walls. In this year of Penn's landing twenty-three ships filled with col onists came up the Delaware. In less than a year eighty houses and cottages were built, three hundred farms laid out, and bounteous crops 1682.] TREATY WITH THE INDIANS. 493 secured. In 1684, there were three hundred and fifty-seven houses, " large and well built, with cellars," and fifty townships had been settled. In 1685, there were six hundred houses. In crease of , , , , , settlers. one year ninety ships brought more than seven thousand people into his province. A treaty had been made with the Indian tribes of the neighbor hood, which only required to be ratified before the Governor. A scene, October 14, 1682, which history has made memor- i , - . . Penn's able, took place under the spreading branches or an Amen- Indian can elm, at Shackamaxon, or Sakimaxing, " place of kings," an old resort for Indian councils. The Indians met Penn at " the half-way house," that is, at noon. They were tribes of the Lenni L en ape, a nation which long ago had its seat beyond the Alleghanies, whence it migrated to the Hudson and D e la war e . Their tribal names were derived from the creeks and rivers of their territory, as Raritan, Assunpink, Mingo, Navesink. They were of a war like disposition, and falling into frequent fights with Indian neighbors. Penn described them well, with a few strokes: '-They are tall, straight, tread strong and clever, and walk with a lofty chin. Their custom of rubbing the body with bear's fat, gives them a swarthy color. They have little black eyes. Their heads and coun tenances have nothing of the negro type, and I have seen as comely European-like faces among them as on your side the sea. Their lan guage is lofty, yet narrow ; like short-hand in writing, one word serveth in the place of three, and the rest are supplied by the understanding of the hearer. I have made it my business to understand it, that I might not want an interpreter on any occasion. In liberality, they excel ; nothing is too good for their friend ; give them a fine gun, coat, or other thing, it may pass twenty hands before it sticks ; light of heart, strong affections, but soon spent. The justice they have is pecuniary. In case they kill a woman, they pay double, and the The Treaty Ground at Kensington, before tne Fall of the " Treaty Tree 494 COLONIZATION BY FRIENDS. [CHAP. XX. The scene at reason they render is, that she breedeth children, which men cannot do. It is rare that they fall out, if sober ; and if drunk, they forgive it, saying, it was the drink and not the man that abused them." On this occasion, Penn had an interpreter. The chief sachem, Taminent, sat in the middle of a semi-circle, composed of old men and councillors. At a little distance behind, "the young fry," in the same order. The sachem deputed one to address Penn, during whose harangue no one whispered or smiled. Penn's com- , , . . r . , pany advanced to this meeting without arms ; he was only distinguished by a blue silk net-work sash. The sachem wore a kind of chaplet, with a small horn projecting from it as a symbol of sovereignty. When he put it on all the natives threw down their arms ; it was a signal that the place was inviolate. The confirmation of the treaty was engrossed upon a roll of parch ment. Penn's address, with its em phasis of the Great Spirit, must have sparkled with a peculiar sincerity, because of his personal belief in a direct intercourse with the source of all power. He told the Indians that every thought of the heart was known above ; that the desire of his own heart was to live in per petual amity with them ; that he and his friends came unarmed be cause they never used weapons. Then the conditions of the purchase were read, and in addition to the stipulated price he presented them with various articles of merchandise. The treaty concluded upon this pacific basis, without the exhibition of a single weapon of modern warfare, and expressly disclaiming a resort to force, was faithfully kept by those barbarians for sixty years. While Penn was allotting land to purchasers, he reserved a tract of a thousand acres for his friend George Fox. Land was frequently purchased of the Indians by paying for as much as the purchaser could comprise in a walk. When some of the best English pedestri ans were detailed for this new style of measurement, they covered so much ground that the Indians were mortified at the unequal bargain. Then an additional present of merchandise set the matter right. Thus the peace was always kept in politic fashion, and the Indian could entertain no cause for feud. Only one alarm ever occurred pur porting to come from an Indian quarter, when one day in 1688, some The Treaty Monument, Kensington 1683.] PROGRESS OF THE COLONY. 495 women came running in with the tidings that a large body of Indians were coming down to massacre. This was dire news to the defence less Friends. But instead of sending out scouts to reconnoitre, who were willing to bear arms, a commissioner was despatched, who, upon arriving at the place indicated, found an old Indian chief lying all alone upon the grass nursing his lame leg, and a number of squaws at work in the field. No other man was in sight. The old chief said the women ought to be hanged for spreading so false a report. Peun used every lawful art of intercourse to conciliate the Indians. " He walked with them," at one of their earliest meetings, sat with them on the ground, and ate with them of their roasted acorns and hominy. At this they expressed their great delight, and soon began to show how they could hop and jump, at which exhibition William Penn, to cap the climax, " sprang up and beat them all." We cannot imagine the fathers of New England jumping in rivalry with savages. Their methods seldom raised a smile. In October, 1683, one Enoch Flower what pleasant Quaker symbolism in the name began to teach boys and girls in a dwelling made of pine and cedar planks. His terms were, and reiig- " To learn to read, four shillings a quarter; to write, six shil- tersinPhu- lings ; boarding scholars, to wit : diet, lodging, washing, and schooling, ten pounds the whole year." A printing-press was set up soon after. From the time of the first settlement of New Netherland it was seventy years before any book or paper was printed there. In 1683, among the emigrants who came over was James Claypoole, author of several books and pamphlets, an admired friend of Penn. He was an uncle of the Lord John Claypoole who married Cromwell's favorite daughter, Elizabeth. He was one of the Friends to whom Penn addressed a touching religious exhortation, just before his re turn to England in 1684, to be read at all Friends' Meetings in the province. The first Yearly Meeting in Philadelphia was held in July, 1683. One reason for Penn's return to England was the necessity for de termining the boundary line between his own province and that of Maryland. Lord Baltimore had already gone on this ntem to business, reasserting the right, under his patent, to the Englal country along the west side of the Delaware, from Philadelphia to Cape Henlopen, which he had so persistently maintained against the Dutch in Stuyvesant's time. On this vexed question, after many delays, Penn succeeded in getting a decision from the Committee of Trade and Plantations against Lord Baltimore. Baltimore, the Dutch had contended, had no title to this country, because it was settled by their people at the time his patent was issued, and that 496 COLONIZATION BY FRIENDS. [('HAP. XX. patent only entitled him to lands uncultivated and inhabited by sav ages. The King had conquered the country from the Dutch and granted it to the Duke of York, and the Duke had conveyed it to William Penn. The title, therefore, was now vested in Penn, as against Baltimore, by Order of Council. 1 But he was moved to go to England by another motive. He had heard of the accusations which were rife against him, that he was working with Jesuits to secure the supremacy of James II., who would have been glad to reintroduce the Roman Catholic religion into England. The only ground for the absurd report seems to have been the favor in which he had been held by Charles II., and still enjoyed from James II. To his care the elder Penn whom James had so much reason for holding in affectionate remembrance had warmly commended his son. Surely that son is not to be blamed that he retained the King's esteem by his admirable bearing, his conciliatory tem per, and his un flinching integrity. The influence he ac quired he used for the benefit of all who were in need, espe cially for hundreds of his own sect who still suffered in pris ons all over England. If he sought to re tain that influence for his own purposes, it was only on behalf of that commonwealth he had founded, which he so loved, and for which he spent his own life and estate. If his principles of toleration found favor with James, it was not because of any leaning, on- Penn's part, to the Catholic Church. It is impos sible not to believe that his numerous avowals against idolatries and ordinances were sincere ; impossible not to accept as true his many disclaimers of any sympathy with the Church of Rome. The " No Cross, no Crown," is thoroughly anti-papal. 2 1 The line fixed by this decision was the present boundary between Maryland and Del aware. The final line between Maryland and Pennsylvania continued a question of dispute till settled by the running of " Mason and Dixon's Line," by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, in 1762. 2 Were we professing to give a complete biography of William Penn, it would be nec- The Penn Mansion, later Residence of the Penn Family in Philadelphia. 1694.] TROUBLES IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 497 But his enemies, and the haters of Quakerism, could not tolerate the favor which his diplomatic disposition, combined with his remark able independence, won for him at court. They were less Pennin the foes of Jesuits. Penn thought it right to use all the in- ^s^- fluence he could command for the benefit of his American province, and to have the new persecutions against the Quakers abated. He succeeded in both purposes. Before leaving America he appointed a Provincial Council to act for him during his absence ; but it was riot long before disputes arose which caused him much anxiety. He could not succeed in prevailing upon the Assembly to restrain the use of spirituous liquors, and to withhold them altogether from the Indi ans. His officers committed many extortions in the sale of his lands. He experienced great difficulty in collecting his quit-rents, and was seriously embarrassed by the great outlay which he had made : " Six thousand pounds out of pocket," he said repeatedly. At the revolution of 1688, he fell under serious suspicion of aiding in the plots for the return of James II. Once he was arrested and brought before the Lords of Council, and, at his own request, was taken before the King. A letter had been written him by James, and when examined in regard to it, he could not, he said, prevent him from writing to him ; but if that brought him under a suspicion of plotting for a restoration, it did not compel him to violate his duty to the state. The King seemed satisfied with his defence, and he was not again molested. It did not seem to him proper, however, to leave the kingdom while under such suspicion, and he remained in England. During this time he was pained by the accounts sent to him of the dissensions in his province. The three lower counties on the Penn re _ Delaware, called the " Territories," had insisted on a sepa- g-^Jri rate government, and to this he reluctantly assented. Other torshi P- difficulties occurred, relating to the religious doctrines of Friends. These were chiefly fomented by George Keith, who had been ap pointed the principal of the Friends' public school in Philadelphia, which was established in 1689. The court took advantage of these disturbances to depose Penn from the government of the province, and another governor was sent out, who administered affairs till Penn was reinstated in 1694, having shown the hollqwness of the charges against himself and reestablished old feelings of amity with the sus- essary to meet the various charges brought against him by Macaulay, in his History of England. A complete refutation of them may be found in a Preface to Clarkson's Life of Penn, by William E. Forster, the English statesman ; in The Life of William Penn, by Samuel E. Janney ; in a Defence of William Penn, by Henry Fairbairn ; and in Dixon's Life of Penn, which on this point, at least, may be considered as an authority. The evi dence is ample, and would be accepted in any court of justice. VOL. ii. 32 498 COLONIZATION BY FRIENDS. [CHAP. XX. picious party in the Society. The new Governor, Fletcher, who was also Governor of New York, had, in the meantime, with the usual fatal facility of royal governors, quarrelled with the Assembly and retired in disgust to New York. Penn made his defence and explanation before the Council in 1693 ; His restore- n ^ s reinstatement in the proprietary government took place tion. j n August, 1694. While he was preparing to return he appointed his cousin, Colonel Markham, Deputy Governor of the province, his friend Thomas Lloyd, who had been his Deputy for some time, having recently died. Markham's administration was, on the whole, satisfactory, and there was little for several years to disturb the tranquillity and prosperity of the colony, which already contained 20,000 people. Penn permitted his private affairs to retain him in England till 1699, when he once more sailed for America with his family, with the firm intention of remaining there for the rest of his days. Miuiiiitumui t i iiiiiiiiimiuuiiiiimwumumuuiuuiaLuuuu i muufiiaiiiiumiiu in [iiiciiiiciuuK c t [uuiiuiiumuuiiiHiiuiiUiHUiiumiuiuiUKiii c uumuiucuitcicutci mi [[ttucHituiu t Htimiiiimimuiiiiitiuuuii uuuiiiuiiiiuuuui t iiiuiiiwiurittwuii inn uiiwuticcu i i iiHiiumuiuiii iiiiuuiii uuuiunmiiimii t [luiiuuuumuaua mm [[fl.tltfUUll I t llinilllllUlUUHI IIIIIUIUIII limillllUimUUIS I IIKUHIUllUUUtl ciuuuunt i i iictuttemtittim MUCH r utuuuumu i fiuti circuital t i ittttntteuiiiicac i i irtm ti n Minimum i nun uriUltlU I ( III- l>l i. Kirrcrt t II (til [II 1C lltllLIUlllll I IIIIIKUKUIIIUIHUIII IIIUIIIII niiinieii i tmiiumtuuuicci c in till iiuimuiuin IIIIMN CCCttlUl C I IMIIIINHIIIIHINCtl I (UllllII It IlllllUIUU natllll iteioiii o t uiHHinmwiNimN i HIHHNU CCIUIIIIIK.II NNMHNMUMNIMM,I mien t t iiitiaiKHiiuittiliitui i iiiiuiiiii i cuuiuuiif i i luiimmiiimuiu i MUM I I HMNmiHUWlllHIIICI t tHIMCltCi C lllUIUUII 1 MllUllllHIIIIKllllli I Hill ( I HIiniMMWNNNlMMM I Itlllllllll i [[UIIIIUl I I KlIIHlUHUIUUtll I I tin ( i aicauuuiiiiuiuiiidcti c [iimitt i cctcuui i i in"" Ml I I III I [ I l(lt(([[t[einMNIMNiMlliMiHii[!l(U(i(i[[i[[[ill{' Wampum received by Penn in Commemoration of the Indian Treaty. CHAPTER XXI. THE FRENCH IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. THE EXPLORATION OF THE MISSISSIPPI AND THE SETTLEMENT OF LOUISIANA. FRENCH MISSIONARIES AND HUNTERS. DISCOVERY OF OHIO, INDIANA, AND OTHER NORTHWESTERN STATES. THE POLICY OF COLBERT AND TALON. DISCOVERY OF THE UPPER LAKES. CONGRESS OF NATIVE TRIBES AT MACKINAC. MARQUETTE AND JOLIET SAIL FOR THE DISCOVERY OF THE MISSISSIPPI. FRENCH COLONY OF 1699. D'lBERVILLE AND HIS BROTHERS. BlLOXI AND POVERTY POINT. WAR OF SUCCESSION. PENSACOLA. MINES. CROZAT'S GRANT. THE English and Dutch settlers, to whose history this volume has thus far been for the most part devoted, never showed any disposition to make permanent homes with the aborigines. Their efforts to Christianize them were made loyally, but did not include life in their wigwams or villages. Even the hunter or trapper of English blood, who brought furs from the frontier to the sea, was not a man who had carried on his hunting or trapping in league with the natives. He had lived in a solitary hut, or he had made his excursions from a fron tier village. From the very beginning, however, a different disposition showed it- Tendency of self in the French colonies of toward"*? Acadie and of Canada. When j^d'ven- the white population of Canada ture- was not more than three hundred per sons, a considerable number of those per sons were living in the villages of the Hurons, 1 whose homes were then further to the east than that great lake which Totem of the Hurons (from La Hontan). ,1 n r i now preserves tneir name. Some of these Frenchmen were traders for furs, some were priests, at first of the 1 The handful of Wyandots, now in Kansas, represents the great tribe of Hurons. The spelling Yendat is the earlier form. See Gallatin's Synopsis. The word " Huron " is itself not Indian but French, derived from the French word hure, meaning a rough mane or head of hair. 500 THE FRENCH IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. [CHAI-. XXI. Recollet order, afterwards of the fraternity of Jesuits. It was by such traders and missionaries that several of the western States of the American Union were first opened to the knowledge of Europe. The great Champlaiu, from whom the real history of Canada be gins, arrived in Quebec on the 3d of July, 1608, only a year after the French P io- settlement at Jamestown. 1 In 1615 he discovered Lake On tario, and Lake Nipissing. He pressed his explorations westward, and recent research has shown that as early as 1634, Jean Nicollet, a Frenchman who had become an Indian in all his habits, visited, in the course of his western travels, the region which we now know as Wisconsin. These were pioneer adventures. Nicollet was himself a sincere Catholic. He and other pioneers were followed, as early as the year 1640, by the Fathers Chaumonot and Bre"bceuf, who --- . Island of Mackir.ac. coasted along the northern shore of the State of Ohio, and the eastern shore of Michigan as far as the Straits of Mackinac. In 1659, two young traders, who pushed their explora tions farther west, joined a tribe of Indians, with whom they went so far west upon Lake Superior, that they heard for the first time of the great tribe of the Sioux, whose conflicts against the whites occupy the journals even as late as our day. At that time, the SiQiix appeared to these travellers a powerful nation, of more gentle manners than the eastern Indians, whom they had known before. The Frenchmen re ported that they were not cruel to their prisoners, and that they wor- 1 See vol. i., p. 321. 1660.] FRENCH MISSIONARIES. 501 shipped one God. 1 These pioneers returned to Montreal in the spring of 1660, with sixteen canoes packed with furs. In these movements, dictated now by adventure, now by religious zeal, and often by both combined, our States of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, were first visited by the whites. Perhaps it would be too much to say, in all cases, that those who made these explo rations were what we should call civilized men. In the summer of 1660 Father Mesnard took with him some In dians of the Algonkin race, and founded a new mission. He -IT Mesnard 's established himself at first at a point on the southern shore Aigonkm mission. of Lake Superior which is still known as Chagwamegan, 2 the name it then bore. Mesnard, however, on the invitation of the Hurons, returned to the western bay of Lake Huron, where he lost his life in some unknown way. In 1665, Father Al louez established a mission at the same point, and was able to preach in the Algonkin lan guage to twelve or fifteen different tribes. The same language is still used by the Chip- peways of that region. The Jesuit writers say that the fame of Father Allouez extended even to the Sioux, and that they other mis- told him of the prairies on the banks of the Mississippi. sions - Father Dablon, another missionary, learned of the Mississippi from a map which the Sioux drew for him, and as early as 1669 proposed to himself an expedition to discover it. With Father Allouez he went as far as the Fox River, and learned that the Wis consin River, of the present State of Wisconsin, was one of the affluents of the Mississippi. Meanwhile the genius of Colbert in France had apprehended the value of the French es tablishment in Canada. He was beginning to undo the unfortunate results of the narrower policy of Cardinal Richelieu. In pursuance of this policy, Jean Talon, who had gained the Totem of the Foxes < from La favor of the king in France, was entrusted with the oversight of commerce in Canada. He arranged a great coun- Totem of the Sioux (from La Hontan). 1 The Sioux call themselves Dahcotahs. 2 Chagwamegan means " on the long, narrow point of land, or sand-bar." For this, and many similar interpretations, we are indebted to Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, the learned master of the Indian tongues. 502 THE FRENCH IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. [CHAP. XXI. Talon's In dian Coun cil. cil of Indians at the Sault Ste. Marie, at the foot of Lake Superior, in 1671. Nicolas Perrot, who knew their languages and customs, convened the assembly. It is in the report of this council that the name " Chicago " first appears in literature. M. de St. Lousson represented Louis XIV. He found here the chiefs of tribes as distant as Hudson's Bay on the east, and the head of Lake Supe rior and Lake Michigan on the west and south. In the joint hyperbole of French genius and the Indian dialect he described the glories of Le grand Monarque. The chiefs declared that they asked for no other father than the great Onnonthio l of the French. A cross was erected, to which the Arms of France was fastened, and possession was assumed in the name of the French crown. Signature of Joliet. View on the Fox River. Louis Joliet had been sent from France to Count Frontenac, the |j governor of Canada, as a proper person to attempt the discovery, overland, of the Pacific Ocean. Talon had already suggested in France, the appointment of Poulet, a captain of Dieppe, for an ex ploration of the Pacific by way of the Straits of Magellan. Father 1 The name lingers among the Indians of the St. Lawrence. In the deposition of Charles Soskonharowane, of Caughuawaga, taken to determine whether Rev. Eleazer Williams should or should not be known as King Louis XVII., son of Louis XVI., this Indian says, " Many incidents of his youth would remove the thought of his being the son of the great Anonthica." Sworn to April 16, 1853. MARQUETTE'S VOYAGE. 503 Marquette, who had already gone as far as Wisconsin as a missionary, joined Joliet, and, in 1673, they started on the expedition in Marquette!s which, so far as we know, the source and course of the Mis- T0 * a s e - sissippi were discovered by Europeans. Of the discovery of its mouth by the adventurous Spaniards, and part of the region above, the his tory is already told in an earlier chapter. 1 In this eventful voyage, the first in which civilized men navigated a large part of the course of a river, which has since become the high way of half a nation, Marquette and Joliet descended the Mississippi as far as the mouth of the Arkansas River. They satisfied themselves that they were in the neighborhood of the Gulf of Mexico, and wishing to avoid any collision with the Spaniards returned to Canada. We have a charming ac count of the enterprise by Marquette himself, which was published in Paris in 1681. The voyagers passed up Green Bay, and the Fox River. Near the head of the Bay was the most ad vanced French station, and here they bade their compatriots good-by. The Indian village there was made up of Miamis, Mascoutins, and Kickapoos, of whom the priests rated the Miamis most highly for civility. The travel lers saw, with pleasure, a cross, which had been erected in the vil lage, and was adorned by the devotion of the natives. They addressed the assembly of them, explained their on FOX object, and enlisted two Miami guides, who should show them the difficult passage by which to cross from the Fox to the Wis consin River; from the waters of the St. Lawrence to those flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. The channel of the river was so choked with wild rice, that the Frenchmen could not have found its course without such help. A passage of little more than a mile brought the explorers to the waters of the Wisconsin. The two guides there left the party of seven Frenchmen alone on these strange waters, five or six hundred leagues from Quebec, according to Marquette's calcula tion, to take the stream which would bear them into lands wholly new. Marquette's own map preserves, with curious accuracy, their route in Wisconsin, through the county of Portage, which takes its 1 See chapter vii., vol. i. The Wild Rice. 504 THE FRENCH IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. [CHAP. XXL name from the easy transfer here made between the two great systems of American waters. They seem to have crossed the portage on the 10th of June. A week was sufficient for the voyage of forty leagues, according to their estimate, which brought them to the Mississippi, which they entered cle MicJtigami ou Jtlinoi 4.0 42. Marquette's Map. 1 with inexpressible joy. They estimated the latitude of the point where the Wisconsin joins it at 42 degrees, about half a degree farther south than it is placed by the more modern observations. 1 The map here given is a part of that published iu Paris by Thevenot as " Marquette's Map." It differs from the original manuscript, which is still preserved, in the spelling of a few of the words, probably only through an error of the engraver. 1673.] RECEPTION BY THE ILLINOIS. 505 For eight days the navigators floated down the river, without seeing men or signs of men. The herds of buffalo, which they called by the Indian word Pisikiou, were new to them, and are carefully described. For fear of surprise, the explorers made but little fire, spent the night in their canoes, anchored a little distance from the shore, and always kept a sentinel on the alert. At last, on the 25th of June, a well worn path on the shore indicated the presence of men, and Marquette and Joliet, warning their crews not to be sur- with the in- prised in their absence, followed up the trodden trail to com municate with the natives. These proved to be Illinois ; and they re- Marquette's Reception by the Illinois. ceived the Frenchmen cordially. The chief of the village came forth naked from his wigwam to welcome them, with his hands raised to the sun ; others flourished the pipe of peace. To these pipes they gave the name " calumet," l now so familiar to us, which was, how ever, new to the voyagers. While the formalities of smoking were 1 Marquette notes the fact that the calumet was made of red stone. The Indians of the Northwest still use the Pipe Rock for their calumets, which has acquired a sacred value. It is found in the ridge between the Missouri and the Mississippi. It appears to be the only locality now known in the world, for that almost precious stone which antiquaries know aa Rosso Antico. 606 THE FRENCH IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. [CnAi>. XXJ. going on, an invitation arrived from the great chief of the Illinois that the strangers should visit him at his village, and they did so. They found him standing between two old men in front of the cabin, which served him for a palace, all three naked. The chief held a calumet turned towards the sun. After felicitating the strangers on their arrival, he invited them into his cabin, and received them, as Marquette says, " with the usual caresses." After a feast, and a sort of triumphal procession in which the strangers saw the town, which consisted of three hundred cabins, more than six hundred persons ac companied them to their canoes, assuring them of the pleasure which their visit had given. They gave to Marquette a calumet, which proved valuable to him afterwards. Leaving their hospitable friends they continued their voyage. They The Painted recognized the rocks known long afterward as the Painted Rocks, on which the designs were so striking that Marquette thought the best painters in France would scarcely have done so well. Traces of these paintings have been made out within the present century. 1 They struck the Missouri, to which they gave the name of Pekitanoui. 2 Their description of its mighty flow, of its muddy water, and the distinctness of its current from that of the Mississippi, notes the points which every traveller first observes, to this day. Marquette says in his journal that he hoped by means of it to make the discovery of the Red Sea or Gulf of California, both these names being given in his time to the same gulf, which we know only by the latter title of the two. In this hope he was encouraged by his Indian The Mis- friends, who told him that by going up the souri River. M i SSO uri, for five or six days, he would come to a beautiful prairie twenty or thirty leagues long ; that he could carry his canoes easily across this prairie to the northwest, where he would find a little river. By this river he could descend ten or fifteen leagues till he came to a little lake, the source of another deep river " which flows to the west and discharges into the sea." All this imaginary geography may have had little foundation, but it excited Marquette's hopes of visiting the Pacific. From the course of the Missouri, and these narratives of the ** 1 See Dr. Shea's paper, Wisconsin Hist. Trans., vol. viii., p. 116. The painting last pre served could be made out, even from the other side of the river. It was called the Piasa Bird. We have found no representation of it sufficiently accurate to copy. It was de stroyed in quarrying, within the memory of the present generation. 2 For Pekitanoni is the misprint of the French printer. Totem of the Illinois. (From La Hontan.) 1673.] THE OHIO RIVER. 507 Indians, he was already satisfied that he should find that the Missis sippi discharged itself into the Gulf of Mexico. He and his companions fixed the latitude of the mouth of the Ohio at 36 north, supposing themselves two degrees farther south than they were. They give the name of Ouabouskigou to this river. The name Wabash, which is the modern form of this word, is now confined to the stream which makes part of the western bor der of the State of Indiana. 1 The travellers here speak of the Shaw- nee Indians, resident on the banks of the Ohio, as a peaceful race, The Ohio. Mouth of the Ohio. who suffered shamefully from the inroads of the cruel Iroquois. It is to be observed that French hunters seem to have come down the Ohio, almost to the point of its union with the Mississippi, before Marquette's voyage, for he al ludes to their account of iron mines upon the river. In a memorial of the date of 1677, La Salle, of whom we are soon to speak, claims 1 Ouabachioui, or Wabashiwi, in the Illinois dialect, means " silver." Some romantic red man may have called the stream a " silver stream,." as so many other poets, of other races, have called other rivers. But Father Du Marest mentions the report, which would grow naturally from the name, that silver mines had been found near it. This report has not been confirmed, nor is it likely to be. In the Chippeway, " Wabashkiki " means " swampy " or " marshy." So certain is it, that one man's silver is another man's dirt. But there seems no reason why Chippeways should have named a river of the Illinois, or Shawnees. Our name Ohio, is from the Iroquois, in allusion to the beauty of the stream. It is so said on a MS. map of 1673, in Mr. Parkinau's possessign." 508 THE FRENCH IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. [CHAP. XXL that he discovered the Ohio. Its upper waters are not far from his post on Lake Erie. Passing the junction of the Ohio, Marquette notes the canebrakes and the mosquitoes, peculiarities of the Mississippi which two centuries have not changed since his time. The discoverers were fain to surround themselves with mosquito nets as they sailed. As they floated down, they saw on shore savages, armed with guns, who invited tribes along them to land, and regaled them with buffalo beef, bear's grease, and " white plums." 1 Their hosts assured them that they bought their guns, powder, knives, hatchets, and cloths from Europeans on the eastern coasts ; that these men had images and hats and played on instruments, and that a voyage of ten days was enough to bring the travellers to the sea. And they seem to have given to Marquette the impression that they themselves had found European traders at the mouth of the Mississippi. On this news he eagerly resumed his voyage. At a point not far from the site of the city of Helena he found a village named Mitchigamea. The name seems to show that its people had strayed thus far from the north. 2 These savages had no guns, but they appeared hostile until they saw the calumet. By an old man who spoke the Illinois language, communication became possible, and these people took the strangers as far as to the next tribe, of which the chief town was ten leagues further down. It was named Akansea, as the French travellers spelled it, 3 and here they met the tribe known to us till lately, as the Arkansas Indians. They have since recovered their original name of Quapaws. 4 Here the Frenchmen were hospitably entertained, a good interpreter was found, and the natives heard with wonder what Marquette told them of the mysteries of faith, and showed a great desire that he might give them further instructions. As to his voyage to the gulf, however, they dissuaded him. It was possible to make it in five days. But the tribes whom he would meet were hostile. They cut off from the Arkansas all commerce with Europeans, and they were so much in the habit of plying to and fro on the river, that the voyagers would be, according to these Indians, in great danger. 1 The prumts Americana of Michaux. Its range is as wide as from the Saskatchewan to Texas. Its colors vary, and, while Marquette calls the plums Wanes, they are sometimes yellow, and sometimes red. 2 See Dr. Shea, loc. cit., p. 116. 8 Or their French printer. * See Dr. Shea, loc. cit., p. 116. Mr. Gallatin suggests that they are the Pacachas of De Soto. Touty calls them Cappas. Mr. Gallatin says : " The superiority of this race of Indians struck the French, who called the Arkansas ' Beaux Hommes.' Their men are said to have exceeded in height the average of the Europeans." 1673.] THE ILLINOIS RIVER. 509 This friendly reception by the Arkansas was not to be wholly relied upon. The same evening the chiefs held a council to The Arkan . decide whether they should not knock the Frenchmen on the sas- head and take their goods. But the great chief forbade, assured the travellers of his protection, and even gave to them, as a token, his own calumet. Joliet and Marquette, however, decided that it was time for them to return. They knew that they were near the Gulf of Mexico. In deed they mistook its real boundary, and expected to find it at a point a hundred miles farther north than New Orleans. They supposed themselves to be in the latitude of forty-four degrees, and in this supposition they were nearly correct, for the site of the village of Dakansea, or Akansea, 1 was nearly opposite the mouth of the Arkan sas River. They reflected that if they fell into the hands of the Spaniards all the results of their expedition would be lost. They therefore turned on their course on the 17th of July. But, when they reached the Illinois River, they took that beautiful stream, and made one of the portages, since so well known, into Lake Michi gan. Of the Illinois Valley Marquette writes : " We have Voyage up seen nothing equal to this river for the goodness of land, theI1Unois - prairies, wood, cattle, deer, goats, wild cats, bustards, swans, ducks, parroquets, and even beaver; there are many little lakes and little rivers." A chief of the Illinois guided their return to Green Bay, and here they arrived in the end of September. In this voyage our States of Missouri and Kentucky were discov ered, so far as we know, to Europeans. There can be no doubt that Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi, which were now visited by Marquette, had been traversed in some parts by De Soto and his fol lowers. 2 Marquette, whose simple and devout narrative makes the reader love the adventurer, remained two years among the Miamis. /-\ i_ .-,. --! -, Subsequent On his way in his canoe to Mackmac in 1675, he stopped Hfe of Mar- on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan to raise an altar and Q celebrate the mass. He then asked his companions to leave him alone for a little while. They did so, and when they returned they found him dead. Joliet, his companion in adventure, had returned to Mon treal in 1674. On his way thither his canoe upset, he lost his papers and his journal, and some curiosities from the discovery. A little 1 Marquette gives one name on his map and the other in the text. 2 See vol. i., p. 165. Coxe, in the appendix to the "Carolana," a book written to show that the valley of the Mississippi belongs to the English crown, says that the first redis covery of the great river after De Soto's was made by adventurers from New England. But Coxe's memorial was dated in 1699, and we have no earlier mention of Col. Wood. 510 THE FRENCH IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. [CHAP. XXI. boy, of ten years old, who had been given to him, was also lost. Joliet himself was four hours in the water, and, as he says, rescued only by miracle. He reported, on his arrival, to Count Frontenac, the governor, and he relates the success of the expedition in a de spatch to Colbert of the 14th of November, of the year after it was completed. When Joliet returned with the tidings of the success achieved by this modest expedition, Robert Cavelier de la Salle, a Nor- Robert Cav- , ,.... ., __ , ciierdeia man gentleman, was living in Canada. He had been trained by the Jesuits in early life, and was determined both to make a reputation and a fortune. He had come to Canada eager to seek a passage to Japan and China, and at this moment had a trading house at Lachine, above Montreal. It is said that the name " La- chine " is taken from that of China. When the news of Marquette's discovery was made known, La Salle waited upon Count Frontenac, and represented that the time had come for an expedition to the Pacific. So little interest had been taken in France in these dis coveries, that as late as April 16, 1676, Louis XIV. writes to Fronte nac, in a letter which still exists in manuscript, " With regard to new discoveries you will not address yourself to them excepting in a great necessity." This was not encouraging. But Frontenac gave La Salle a good introduction at court, and he obtained from the Marquis of Seignelay, who had succeeded Colbert as Minister of Marine, all that he asked for. He sailed from Rochelle for Canada, in the summer of 1678, with thirty men, and with the stores proper for equipping the vessels which he meant to build upon the lakes. Arriving at the head of Lake Ontario, he made the portage by Niagara Falls to Lake Erie, and at Fort Frontenac began to build a ship of forty-five tons, which he called the Griffin. On the 7th of August, 1679, she sailed on her western voyage, and on the 28th of that month arrived at Mackinac. The appearance of a vessel of her size, armed with seven cannon, waking on occasion with their thunders the echoes of the wilderness, amazed the natives, who had, till now, never seen the servants of their great Onnonthio, Louis XIV., but in the humbler garb and equipage of trappers and missionaries. La Salle proceeded in state to hear mass at the chapel of the Ottawas at Mackinac, and then continued his voyage of vova g e prosperously to the settlement of Green Bay, where the Griffin. ^Q arrived in September. Freighting the Griffin with furs, he proceeded to St. Joseph at the head of Lake Michigan, at the mouth of the river which still bears that name, nearly opposite the river Chicago. Here he built a fort, and here he expected the Griffin, which did not return, however, and was in fact never again heard of. 1679.] LA SALLE AND FATHER HENNEPIN. 51] Anxious though lie were, lie pushed his explorations westward, and somewhere at the head of the Illinois River, probably in the very county which bears his name, he established Fort Creve-Coeur, which took its name from his depression of spirits in the calamities of that sad winter. No tidings came of the Griffin, and La Salle determined to return by land to Niagara. He first detached Father Hennepin, a missionary, with one com panion, to trace the Illinois to its mouth, and then to ascend IIenn epi^ g the Mississippi in search of a route to the Pacific. This J ourne y- Hennepin did. He appears but meanly as a narrator, or as a voyager, in comparison with the modest and unselfish Marquette. He availed himself of the " local colouring " which he thus acquired, to give probability to a ly ing narrative, which he published in France some years afterward, in which he claimed for himself the honor, which belongs to La Salle alone, of tracing the river to the Gulf of Mexico. There is no better instance in literary history of the danger of such an at tempt, or the certainty that it will furnish the means within itself to disprove its own statements. What Hennepin did was to sail down the Illinois to its mouth, and then to ascend the Mississippi as far as the falls of St. Anthony. Here he was taken prisoner by the Sioux, who permitted him to return to his countrymen, on condition that he would revisit them in the next year. La Salle had left his companion Henri de Tonty 1 in charge at Crdve- Coeur while he went back to Niagara. At this time however the Iroquois, always hostile to the French, and excited, as La Salle thought, by his personal enemies, attacked the Illinois, among whom the fort was situated: 2 Tonty's whole garrison was five men. He found himself obliged to evacuate OSve-Coeur and to return. While he passed down Lake Michigan on its west side, La Salle passed up on the other with reinforcements. His heart must have quailed again ^^iwi when he came to Crdve-Cceur to find it deserted. After this rpturn - failure, he could only do his best to secure alliances with the Indians, 1 He was son of Lorenzo Tonty, who invented the Tontine. 2 Mr. Parkman lias identified the site of the great town of the Illinois. It is near Utica, La Salle County, Illinois. Sioux Chief (from Catlm). Signature of Tonty. 512 THE FRENCH IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. [CHAP. XXI. and then returned to Montreal. Here he had to compound with his creditors, for the loss of the Griffin left him unable to meet his pecuniary obligations. He said, himself, that with the exception of the governor, Count Frontenac, it seemed as if every man in Canada were opposed to his adventure. He succeeded, however, in bring ing together the resources for his undertaking, and started once more, on the expedition which proved successful, in the summer of 1681. 1 The party embarked on Lake Erie at the end of August, and ar rived at the port at St. Joseph early in November. La Salle there Site of Chicago chose for his party twenty-three Frenchmen and eighteen Indians, of the Abnakis and Mohegans, New England tribes, which had put themselves under his protection. Daniel Coxe, in his memorial to William III., cited above, says that these native New Englanders were chosen, because they had in the year before accompanied a con siderable number of adventurers from New England to the Missis sippi. The statement is probable enough, but the narrative to which Coxe refers has not yet been found in the Massachusetts archives. The Indians took with them ten of their wives and these women had three children. The whole party thus consisted of fifty-four persons, among whom were the Chevalier Henri de Tonty, Father Zenobe, of 1 We have his own narrative, written in the third person, recently discovered in the ar chives in France, and printed in Thomassy's Geology of Louisiana. We have also Jou- tel's narrative, and that of the Chevalier Tonty. 1682.] LA SALLE'S SECOND EXPEDITION. 513 the Recollet Order, and Dautray, the son of the procureur general of Quebec. They crossed the lake to the Chicago River, to which they had given the name of the Divine River. 1 Time has preserved the native name, of which the derivation is not savory, and, as time will, has forgotten the piety of the discoverers. This river proved ' Second 6X- to be frozen, and Tonty, who commanded the advance, had pedition of to build sledges for the party and its boats. They left the site of the present city of Chicago on the 27th of January, 1682, and were obliged to haul their luggage and provisions eighty leagues. On this march they passed the chief village of the Illinois, but the tribe wintered elsewhere. At the widening of the river where Fort Crve- Co3iir stood, which they called Lake Pimedy, they found the ice melted. Here they were able to launch their canoes, and in them they arrived at the mouth of the Illinois on the 6th of February. La Salle placed this point at 38 of north latitude. In this calculation lie was a degree too far south. The ice of the Mississippi detained them for a week, when they sailed. The next day, on the fourteenth, they passed the village of Tamaroa, but here, also, they found no inhabitants, and they con tinued their voyage for more than a hundred leagues without meeting any person. On the first of March, having lost one of his hunters, La Salle established a fort on shore, and ordered several excursions in hope of finding him. In one of these two natives were taken prison ers, who said that they were Sicachas. They were probably of our tribe of Chickasaws. 2 They said their town was distant a day and a half's journey. But, after La Salle had accompanied them for that time, the town proved to be still three days off, and he refused Lo go farther. One of them returned with him, and the other said he would bring the chiefs to the river. La Salle returned to his boats, the lost hunter had meanwhile been found, 3 and on the 3d of March he continued his voyage. On the 13th, after sailing forty-five leagues, the sound of drums and war-cries gave notice that the savages had discovered them, and on the right bank of the river their village could with to be seen. La Salle established himself at once on the left bank and in an hour's time built a fort on a point of land there. The Indian chiefs sent across a canoe, the occupants of which received the calumet of peace, and pleasant relations were at once opened 1 La Salle's text is distinct. " Pour aller vers la riviere Divine, appelee par les Sauvages Chicagou." On many of the maps the name Divine is given to the Illinois. 2 Their name is mentioned in the narratives of De Soto. 3 The hunter's name was Prudhomme, and was given to a fort at this place, which re tained that name long after. VOL. ii. 33 514 THE FRENCH IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. [CiiAr. XXI. between the parties. La Salle remained with his hosts three days, and, when he left, they provisioned him from their stores. He no ticed, at once, the difference between them and the northern Indians. " These are better formed," he says, " free, courteous, and of a gay humour. The northern Indians are all triste and of severe disposi tion." This village is described as opposite the mouth of the Ohio. " Many kinds of fruits and peaches were already formed on the trees." La Salle planted a cross there, with King Louis's arms, and on his re turn, he found they had surrounded the cross with a palisade. They also gave him provisions, and interpreters to communic.ate with their allies, the Taensas, eighty leagues further down. The Taen- 8&S. Wisconsin Indians gathering Wild Rice. On the 22d he came to the Taensas, whom he found living in eight villages. He had passed, without stopping, the villages of the Arkansas. He describes the houses of the Taensas as built of walls of mud and straw, the roof of canes, which form a dome ornamented by painting. " They have bedsteads and other furniture and embellishments. They have temples in which they bury the bones of their chiefs, and they are clothed with white robes, made of the bark of a tree, which they spin." The whole account shows rela tionship to the Natchez and, probably, to Mexican or other Southern tribes. Their chief received De Tonty hospitably, La Salle having 1682.] LA SALLE'S GREAT DISCOVERY. 515 sent him as his ambassador. Continuing their navigation, the French opened communication with the Natchez, who told them that they were still ten days from the sea. On the 2d of April they were for the first time attacked by Indians, who belonged to a tribe called Quinipisa. 1 The French had offered them the calumet, but the sav ages fired their arrows and fled. La Salle did not pursue them, but kept on his course. On the 6th the river divided into three branches. La Salle took the west, he sent De Tonty to the middle, and Dautray to the left. Two leagues farther and the water was salt, a little more, and the sea appeared, and the great discovery was made ! - On the 9th of April, La Salle planted a cross with the arms of France. They sang the hymn Vexilla Regis and the Te ^^neat Deum, and in the name of King Louis he took possession of oflh^Tnt the river and all the streams which fall into it, and all the sissi PP L countries which belong to them. This act of possession has been sub stantially respected ever since. It is under this act that France held her rights to the great province known as Louisiana, and, there fore, it is under this act that the United States holds the State of Louisiana, and all its territory north of the line of Texas and west of the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains, to this day. It must be remembered, that, un til 1803, the name LOUISIANA ap plies to the whole Mississippi valley. La Salle's provisions were nearly exhausted. The party found some dried meat near the mouth of the river, and were glad to satisfy their hunger with it, till the suspicion was started that it was the flesh of men. On this the whites left it to the savages, who declared it was delicious. 2 On the 10th of April, La Salle began his return ; and, until they came to the Quinipisa In dians, the party had to live on alligator's flesh and potatoes. He suc- 1 On the map, as drawn by Franquelin, this is spelled Kennipesa, the same as were after wards spelled Colapissas, and Aqueloupissas, " Those who hear and see." 2 See report of Father Zenobe, of which the original is in possession of M. Dooz, of Baton Rouge. Portrait of Louis XIV. His return. 516 THE FRENCH IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. [CHAP. XXI. ceeded in capturing four women of the Quinipisa ; he explained to them that his intentions were peaceable, and by their means purchased maize and other supplies from the tribe. He was well received by the Taen- sas and Arkansas, arriving at the villages of the latter on the 17th of May. When he was a hundred leagues below the Illinois River he fell dangerously ill. He was therefore obliged to intrust his dispatches to De Tonty, who went on in advance. La Salle himself was detained forty days by his illness. He arrived at St. Joseph at the end of Sep tember, but the approach of winter prevented his return to Quebec. " He thus finished," he says in closing his report, " the most important and difficult discovery which has ever been made by any Frenchman, without the loss of a single man, in the same country where Jean Ponce de Leon, Pamphile de Narvaez, and Ferdinand de Soto per ished unsuccessful, with more than two thousand Spaniards. No Spaniard ever carried through such an enterprise with so small a force, in presence of so many enemies. But he has gained no advan tage for himself. His misfortunes and the frequent obstacles in his way have cost him more than two hundred thousand livres. Still he will be happy if he has done anything for the advantage of France, and if his endeavors may win for him the protection of Monseigneur." Father Mambre" took to France La Salle's report of his great dis- iiis report covery. Unfortunately for the great explorer, Count Fron- to France, tenac had been replaced by M. de la Barre, who had con ceived a dislike of La Salle. He had written home, charging him with the Iroquois war ; and he afterwards represented that La Salle was a mischief-maker among the Indians, who perverted his royal commission for the purposes of mere trade. But so soon as La Salle himself was able to report in person at Paris, he swept away any in jurious impressions which had been thus made. The French mon archy was never at a higher point of success or ambition. The peace of Nimeguen in 1678 had given to Louis almost all he could ask for. Seignelay. the Minister of Marine, listened with pleasure to La Salle's narratives. 1 He sent directions to La Barre to restore Fort Frontenac, on the Niagara, to his agents ; and to La Salle himself he gave large powers for the colonization of Louisiana. In the memoir, which is still preserved, which La Salle addressed to the Marquis Seignelay, he proposes to establish a colony sixty leagues above the mouth of the river. This would have been, accord ing to his own map, not far from the point where the Atchafalaya makes a separate course from the Mississippi to the sea, and it is probable that he intended at that point to establish his colony. With- 1 On Franquelin's map, made in 1684, under La Salle's direction, the Mississippi is named the " Colbert," and the Red River is named the " Seignelay." 1685.] LA SALLE'S VOYAGE TO TEXAS. 517 out any disguise, he proposes, as the principal object of this colony, such an attack on the back of the Spanish possessions, as was to open to the French their thirty silver mines in New Biscay. And he coolly remarks, that if the peace of Europe makes it necessary to postpone such designs, it will be well to be prepared for them in the event of a war. He says that Spain makes six million crowns yearly by these mines, and that, with superior ease of transport of silver, France will make much more. La Salle is truly enough called a representative of the spirit of chivalry, and to the real spirit of the chivalrous ages such a proposition as this not unfitly belongs. Seignelay and the King gave him more than he asked for. The colonists sailed from Rochelle on the 24th of July, 1684, ad- Lagan^ mirably well equipped, in four vessels, a part of a fleet thirdv y a s e - of twenty-five, of which the others were bound to the French West Indies and to Canada. But the passage across the Atlantic was then long. Much time was consumed in stopping at San Domingo, and the year had almost ended before the squadron of La Salle was near the mouth of the Mississippi. By a terrible misfortune, due to the diffi culty of rightly calculating longitude in those times, 1 they passed the true mouth of the great river. On the 1st of January, 1685, La Salle landed, perhaps on the southern shore of our State of Louisiana, near the Sabine, but he could learn nothing from the Indians, and continued west for a fortnight longer. When they found the coast trending south, they were sure of their own error. But the captain of the fleet, Beaujeu, refused to return along the coast, and after an altercation between him and La Salle, the vessels entered Matagorda Bay, which they called the Bay of St. Bernard. Here the stores of the colony were landed, and here Beaujeu, who had been at cross-purposes, Matagorda left them. By such a series of misfortunes did it happen Ba> ' that the State of Texas was the earliest, after Florida, of the States which we call Gulf States, to be colonized by Europeans. Beaujeu left the party on the 12th of March, 2 under circumstances of cruel desertion. On his return to France he made the most unfavorable report, and to him, and possibly to Jesuit hatred, may it be attributed that no relief was sent out to the great explorer. To the stream which flows into Matagorda Bay from the northwest, La Salle gave the name Les Vetches, from the buffaloes he found 1 A quarter of a century after, Sir Cloudesley Shovel and his fleet were lost on the coast of Cornwall, because their longitude was more than a degree out of the way. 2 He left among other stores eight cannon, which the King had given to the colony. They were lately to be seen at Goliad, identified by having Louis XIV.'s mark upon them. 518 THE FRENCH IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. [CHAP. XXI. there. Near the same spot, the town of Lavaca retains the name, the only name given by La Salle to his establishments in Texas which has been preserved. The name St. Louis was given to the new settle- The Texas nient. The Indians, whom he found in Texas, were of the same great race as the tribes he had met on the Mississippi. They had large and populous villages, with well-built cabins, said to La Salle's Landing in Texas (reduced fac-simile from Hennepin). be sometimes forty and fifty feet high. 1 They had traded with the Spaniards for horses, clothing, spurs, and silver spoons, and knew what money was. La Salle found them gentle and hospitable. Among such tribes he was to pass what little was left of his adventurous life. 1 Father Douay's narrative. It is supposed that the name Texas is from the Spanish Tejas, in allusion to these covered houses. 1687.] LA SALLE'S OVERLAND JOURNEY. 519 His colony once sufficiently established, he left it on the 1st of No vember, 1685, on an expedition of discovery, always hoping to find, what Joutel, his second in command, learned to call " his unfortunate river." Once and again from such expeditions, in which he trav ersed Texas far in different ^^ routes, he returned to the set- f tlement, always to hear some ^ new story of misadventure. **^ But his own buoyant and easy temper would restore the spirits . . - , , , , Signature of Beaujeu. of his men, and he would find new resource in every difficulty. At last, at the end of 1686, he de termined to lead a party across to Canada to obtain succors from France for the colony, for which, thanks to Beaujeu's treachery, no supplies had arrived in two years' time. On the 7th of January, 1687, this hero, who combines in his own character so much that would have challenged regard in a chevalier of the days of Philip Augustus, and would com- journey to mand respect in' the vigorous enterprises of to day, left the wretched colony, on what was to prove his last adventure. For want of better material, the clothing which he and his men wore was made from the sails of the little vessel which had been lost. He was to lead his party nearly two thousand miles overland. The same journey may be made to-day by railroad, and the traveller if he chooses, takes his ease. But even now, no man thinks the journey a trifle. Poor La Salle and his companions were to make it with little guidance beside that which the compass gave them, and must trust to their weapons or their address, to secure their passage among hostile tribes. He had bought five horses from the Indians, who had already learned the use of horses from the Spaniards. These beasts were used as pack-horses for the party. Twenty of the colonists, among whom were seven women and girls and some children, were to remain behind under Barbier, a hunter, who had been married since their ar rival in America, and who was appointed governor in the place of Joutel. La Salle made them a farewell address in his own engaging way, and all who were to stay, while they felt the necessity of his journey, were melted to tears. Yet, doubtless, they felt that their dangers were less than his. The travelling party consisted of about twenty also. La Salle and his brother Cavelier, the priest, with their two nephews, Ija Salle , g Joutel and Father Anastasius, Duhaut and Liotot, the sur- com P anions - geon, were those who seemed the most distinguished of the party. 620 THE FRENCH IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. [CHAP. XXL Beside them were a man named Hiens, who had been a buccaneer, and was sometimes known as English Jem, and Nika, a faithful Shawnee Indian. In that climate, there is no real hardship in travelling in January, and had the party been better provided, ^ wou ^ nave ma de rapid progress, com- pared with what proved possible. But Signature of Cavelier. * , -i ,f they lacked shoes, until they could sup ply their place with buffalo-hide and deer-skin. The rivers were swollen, and they were obliged to make boats from hides to ferry them. Thus they crossed the Brazos, and in two months' time, they approached Trinity River. Nothing but the scantiness of their equip ment, and the fullness of the streams and rivers, accounts for the slow ness of their progress. Meanwhile the members of the party were not on good terms. La Salle appeared reserved and anxious, and Liotot and Duhaut had quarrelled with young Moranget, his nephew. On the 15th of March, La Salle sent a party from camp to find some provisions which he had left on his last expedition. They found the provision spoiled, but they killed two buffaloes, and sent to La Salle for horses to bring the meat. La Salle sent Moranget and two others with the horses. They found the successful hunters, among whom were Duhaut, Liotot, and Heins, already curing the meat. Moranget, hot-headed boy as he was, broke into rage with them, be cause they had put by for themselves some part of the meat, to which the customs of hunting entitled them. It was not the first of Mutiny in Moranget's outbursts of rage. Duhaut was so angry, that the camp. j ie cons p u . e ^ w ith the others to kill Moranget, and, as he knew the fidelity of Nika the Indian, and Saget, La Salle's servant, their death also was determined. Night came, the three victims each served his watch in turn. So soon as they slept, Duhaut and Heins stood by with their guns cocked, and Liotot, with an axe, killed the three sleeping men. La Salle was six miles away. They did not dare join him. When the others had been absent two days, La Salle sought them in his anxiety, accompanied by the friar Anastasius. As they walked he talked with the priest on religious themes, and of his gratitude to God for his safety in twenty years' peril. Suddenly he was overcome with profound sadness, and was so much moved that Father Anastasius scarcely knew him. They came near Duhaut's camp, and La Salle noticed two birds of prey hovering above. He saw on the ground a piece of bloody clothing. He fired Murder of n ^ s * wo pistols to summon the hunters. They heard the La saiie. sno ts, and crossed a little river to meet him. La Salle asked for his nephew. One of them replied insolently, that " Moranget 1687.] FATE OF LA SALLE AND HIS COLONY. 521 was along the river." La Salle rebuked him. Duhaut fired his gun in reply, and La Salle fell dead, shot through the brain. "There you are, great pashaw," 1 this was the contemptuous cry of the false surgeon. Such was the death of one of the noblest heroes of France, when he seemed at the very prime of his life. He was only forty-three years old. Had he lived, with his spirit and power of command, to carry out the enterprise he had planned, the history of Louisiana must have been different. By his death, the valley of the Mississippi was left for nearly twenty years more to be the home of savages. After his death, the first history of his colony, which had left France in such high hope, sinks into the separate effort of the colonists to escape with their lives from a wilderness. In a quarrel Death of among the murderers, Duhaut, who had himself fired the fa- Duhaut - tal shot which killed La Salle, was himself killed, and the little com pany afterwards broke in pieces. Joutel, Father Anastasius, the two relatives of La Salle, and four others, made a separate party, which persevered towards Canada. They had horses, which they had ob tained from the natives, and, by following a northeast course, from the country of the Caddos, above the lake of that name on Red River, they came out, to their delight, on the 24th of July, upon a cottage built in the French fashion, and a cross upon the northern side of the Arkansas River, just above the place where it unites with the Missis sippi. The cottage was the home of two Frenchmen, Charpentier and De Launay, both of the city of Rouen, whom De Tonty, La Salle's old companion, had left at the junction of the Arkansas and Mississippi, in the spring of 1685. De Tonty had gone down the river, in vain, in hopes to meet his old chief there. The names of these Frenchmen deserve permanent record, as those of the persons who established the first permanent post of Europeans south of the Illinois River, in the valley of the Mississippi. From this point the friends of La Salle went home by routes now familiar to the French. The fate of the twenty colonists left at St. Louis, in Matagorda Bay, is not clear. A Spanish officer, dispatched to find them in 1689, found only the deserted settlement. Two of the 1 " Te voila, grand bacha, te voila." Joutel's narrative. There are three narratives by members of this wretched expedition : Father Cavelier, Joutel's, and that of Father Anas tasius. We have followed Mr. Parkman's thrilling narrative. The spot is not determined. The Texan historian supposes it to have been near the Neches River where the old Indian trail crosses that stream. Yoakum's Hist, of Texas, i. 38. But the old map of De Lisle places it distinctly at a point about seven miles west of Trinity River, in the county of San Jacinto, not very far from the field of the critical battle known by that name. 522 THE FRENCH IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. [CHAP. XXI. murderous party were arrested by the same officer, and were even tually condemned to the Spanish mines. Thus the first French effort to colonize the southwest left no sign, in 1689, but the cottage of the two Frenchmen who were established at the mouth of the Arkansas, with the addition of a third from La Salle's party. The successful colonization of Louisiana, and from Louisiana up wards, of the valley of the Mississippi, was due not to the spirit of chivalry, so far as that was represented by La Salle, or to his chival rous plans for seizing the Spanish silver mines, but to more modern developments of the spirit of mercantile adventure. It is probable that the long and successful enterprises of La Salle Canadian an( i u ^ s companions were the first steps which led to the edu- expiorers. ca tioii of a race of men still existing, known as the Cana dian Voyageurs. In all the great river adventures of North America from those days down, these voyageurs have taken their part, humble, but none the less essential. The names of such men are in the nar ratives of Hearne and Mackenzie, of Lewis and Clarke, of Franklin, Back, and the Simpsons. The nomenclature which they have created is still in use on all the American rivers between New Brunswick and California, and their readiness to undertake any of the hardships of a campaigner's life makes them favored volunteers in the compo sition of any expedition of adventure. From the time when De Tonty went down the river in 1686, in unsuccessful hope of meeting La Salle, there. was, perhaps, not a single year that some of these voy ageurs did not u try the adventure " of the Mississippi in whole or in part. 1 But it was not for ten years after La Salle's death that the French Crown made any effort to renew the colonization of the Mississippi valley. The work was then put into competent hands. The Sieur Lemoyne d'Iberville was the third of eleven brothers, sons of Charles Lemoyne, Baron Longueuil, of Canada. To him was intrusted the oversight of an expedition fitted out by the King to plant a colony. Two frigates conveyed the colonists, of which D'Iberville himself commanded the larger, so that the evils of a divided command, which had broken the strength of La Salle's effort, were avoided. A third vessel joined at Saint Do mingo, and on the 25th of January, 1699, the expedition arrived at the island of St. Rosa, just below Pensacola. At this point the Spaniards had established themselves more than a month before. 1 It has been said that a party went to the mouth of the Mississippi as early as 1686. No such party made a permanent establishment ; this statement is derived from some recol lection of De Tonty 's expedition. 1700.] D'IBERVILLE AND BIENVILLE. 523 D'Iberville spent some weeks in exploring the coast, and on the 2d of March entered the Mississippi River. He had with him Father Anastasius, who ^ had accompanied hs La Salle, and who ****** found no difficulty . . . Signature of D'Iberville. in recognizing its turbid waters and its majestic flow. Evidence more convincing to D'Iberville was found, when, forty leagues up the river, they found the Bayagoula Indians, who brought out cloaks which La Salle had given them, a breviary which Father Anastasius had left in 1682, and a letter which De Tonty had left in 1686. They called it "a speaking bark." l D'Iberville's first post was at Biloxi Island, in Mobile Bay. He returned to France, and was again despatched to the river. He founded his second post at a point on the Mississippi, now known as Poverty Point, about thirty-eight miles below the present city of New Orleans. The settlement at Biloxi was within the limits of the present State of Alabama, and was the first establishment of whites there. It was abandoned after a year for a station further up on ment at BI- the Mobile River, about eighteen leagues from the sea. The settlement at Poverty Point was the first settlement made in Lou isiana. It was established in 1700. By this time D'Iberville had the assistance of a Canadian colony to meet him by the way of Lake Erie and the Miami portage. While D'Iberville was absent in France, his brother Bienville fell in with an English ship, commanded by Captain Barr, which was twenty-eight leagues up the river, having been sent out to explore and take possession of the Mississippi. Bienville boldly told him that the Mississippi was farther west, that this river was a depend ency of Canada of which he had taken possession, and Barr went in search of the great river, just where poor La Salle had looked for it so vainly. The reach of the. river where this intervieAv took place is still known as the " English turn." The expedition thus ar rested was a private expedition sent out by Coxe, an Englishman, who held a charter given by Charles L, for a supposed province of Carolana or West Florida. Our only other account of this expedi tion is by Coxe's son, and was published twenty years after. He complains that the captain of one ship deserted the other, but says that one of the two ascended the river one hundred miles. 2 1 " iZcorce parlante." 2 The younger Coxe's map is drawn to show that all of southern Louisiana, except the 524 THE FREXCPI IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. [CHAI>. XXI. During the war of succession, in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, Spain and France were in alliance, and the Spanish governors, both of Mexico and of Florida, rendered one and another service to the in fant French colony which D'Iberville, and his brothers Bienville and Serigny, re quited as they could in their weakness. 1 The history of the infant State is but little more than that of a small garrison, whose enterprising commanders were making alliances with the neigh boring savages. Communi cation was constantly kept up with Canada, and in 1700, Le Sceur, an explorer of mines, went so far as Lake Superior, and re turned, with what the chronicler says was two hundred thousand pounds of copper ore. 2 It must be doubted whether any such quantity was carried across the Portages of Wisconsin or Minne sota, especially as Le Soaur's journal says that it was in three ca noes. The pacification of Europe resulting from the Treaty of Utrecht, gave the signal for an enlargement of the little colony. At that time the military force in Louisiana did not exceed one hundred French soldiers, and seventy-five Canadians. There were perhaps three hun- very months of the Mississippi, was included in the charter of "Carolana," that is, was north of 31 north latitude. The line of 31 is the northern line of our State of Florida, and the southern of the greater part of Mississippi. Coxe claims the river for England on the ground that his father's ship was the first to enter it from the sea. It probably was, but the claim of discovery is absurd. Still, had William the Third lived longer, he might have followed up this claim. 1 Archiv de la Marine. No. 9, No. 458 in Mr. Forstall's list. 2 La Harpe's narrative, preserved in MS. in the Philosophical Society's Library. The text is, " Monsieur Le Sueur arriva avec 2000 quint x de terre bleue y verte, venaut des Scioux." The narrative, in an English translation, has been published by Mr. Trench in the Louisiana Historical Transactions. Portrait and Signature of Bien 1713.] CROZAT'S GRANT. 525 dred whites beside, and twenty negroes held as slaves, scattered over the enormous territory known as Louisiana. So soon as the peace came, the King granted the whole territory to Antoine Louisiana J.V L U 1 ' t0 0rOZat ' Crozat, one of those great financiers who play so curious a part in the French history of those times. The grant says specific ally, that in consequence of the war there had been no possibility of reaping the advantages which might have been expected. It says also that Crozat's zeal, and singular knowledge in maritime commerce, encourages hope for as good success as in his former enterprises, u which have procured great quantities of gold and silver to the kingdom in such conjunctures as have rendered them very accept able." In the grant, the great rivers are thus named: "The river St. Louis, heretofore called Mississippi, the river St. Philip, heretofore called Missouri, the river St. Jerome, heretofore called Ouabache." But these names have lasted as little as the other special Crozat -8gov- privileges granted to Crozat. The grant cedes all territo- ernment - ries watered by the Mississippi. Crozat appointed as his governor, La Mothe Cadillac, a soldier, in place of Le Muys, who had died on his passage hornet Le Muys had been the governor-general named by the King. Cadillac arrived at the colony in May, 1713, bringing the news of peace, the news of the grant to Crozat, and of his own appointment. With him came several officers of administration. D'Iber- Beginning of ville had died, but his influence in the colony was inher- ^enie In ited by his brother, Bien ville, so long celebrated in the thecolon y- history of Louisiana. Naturally enough altercations grew up between the new officials and Bienville and his friends, which were the basis of parties extending well down into that century. In a colony where there were not a hundred persons resident at any one point, and at this time not more than four hundred persons in all, such alter cations were, doubtless, all the more bitter. Crozat's plans were based on the hope of commerce with the Spaniards. But the Span ish government changed its policy, and fell back on a system of exclu sion, which had originated with Philip II., and which generally char acterized its rule of its colonies, until it brought that rule to an end. Cadillac remained in the country but two years. He made some per sonal explorations, and ordered an expedition into Texas, which will be best described in our chapter on the early history of that State. His successor was M. de L'Epinay. Bienville was appointed King's Commandant, while De L'Epinay was Governor-general. There was 526 THE FRENCH IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. [HAP. XXL no less dissension between these two than between Bienville and Cadillac. But the fortunes of the colony were not dependent on as trivial motives as the discords of local commanders. With the death of " Le grand Monarque " in 1715, and the accession of the Regent Duke of Orleans to the sway of France, a new destiny awaited Lou isiana. It came through the spirit which was given to emigration by the enterprise, so disastrous in Europe, of the famous John Law, known in history as the Mississippi Scheme. Indians in a Canoe (fac-simile CHAPTER XXII. John Law. THE MISSISSIPPI SCHEME. JOHN LAW. THE REGENT ORLEANS. LAW'S BANK. THE WESTERN COMPANY. RENEWED EMIGRATION. THE INDIAN COMPANY. SPANISH WAR. NEW ES TABLISHMENTS. FAILURE OF LAW'S PLANS. RUIN OF SPECULATORS. MIS SIONS IN LOUISIANA. THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS. ESTABLISHMENT AT NATCHEZ. RELATIONS WITH THE INDIANS. CUSTOMS OF THE NATCHEZ. CHO- PART'S FOLLY. ITS RESULTS. CAMPAIGNS AGAINST THE NATCHEZ AND OHICKA- SAWS. BlENVILLE RE-APPOINTED. HlS ILL-SDCCESS AS A MILITARY LEADER. VAUDREUIL AND KERLEREC. JOHN LAW was born in Edinburgh in April, 1671, the son of a gold smith of considerable fortune. The goldsmiths of that day were the bankers of the world, and all the social privileges of a banker of to-day belonged to this Scotch goldsmith then. John Law was but fourteen years old when his father died. He was edu cated with care, but did not choose to embrace his father's calling, preferring a life of pleasure arid travel. He left his mother at the age of twen ty, and went first to Lon don, where, like many other adventurers, he applied his knowledge of finance and mathematics to the calcula tions of the gambling table, without more success than is usual. His mother paid his debts and saved his estate. For himself he became pop- ular in London ; but the fortune of Louisiana was changed, as it happened, on the 9th of April, 1694, when in a duel in Bloomsbury Square, he killed on the spot a gentleman named Edward Wilson, " commonly called Beau Wilson." For this John Law. 528 THE MISSISSIPPI SCHEME. [CHAP. XXII. Ilia career and finan cial schemes. offence he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, but was par doned by the King. He was, however, thrown into prison on some charge connected with the duel, but he effected his escape and fled to the continent. At Amsterdam he became a clerk of the English Resident, in order *o study the system of the celebrated Bank of Amsterdam ; an( j a k thirty years of age he returned to Scotland. About the year 1700, he presented in print a plan for what we should now call The National Bank of Scotland, far in advance of the financial wisdom of the day, and, indeed, only differing from the systems now in use in the European national banks, so far as it included the system, then universal, of monopolies of com merce and of farming out the revenue. Another plan of his, at this time, that for a land bank, has been often brought forward since, but never really tried. Neither Scotland nor England was prepared for his financial schemes, and, returning to the continent, he engaged himself in the not uncongenial occupa tion of gambling, managing faro banks with profit. This occupation brought him into acquaintance with the Duke of Orleans, an acquaintance which afterwards proved so important. On the close of the war of the succession he urged his financial plans on Reception of tne French government, which was already bankrupt. But the con"i ? - n Louis XIV. rejected them, not so much because the plans were not good, of which nobody in France was a judge, as because the author of them was a Protestant. Law went to offer them to Victor Amadeo at Turin, and to the Emperor of Germany. Both these sovereigns declined to try his experiments. But at their courts and elsewhere, he won two million livres at gambling, and this he carried to Paris, where it became the nucleus of his after fortunes. Louis XIV. died. His ambition, his selfishness, and in especial, the war of the succession, had brought France to bankruptcy. It is not fair to ascribe this bankruptcy to John Law. The truth is, that he The Regent Orleans. 1715.] JOHN LAW. 529 postponed for a few years the inevitable catastrophe. To borrow the language of the modern exchange, he flew the great kites, which, for a little while, promised to carry France over an abyss. When the King died the royal stocks were at a discount of from seventy to eighty per cent. A treasury report of September 20, 1715, shows that the annual expenses were one hundred and forty-eight million livres. 1 All the receipts of the year were pledged in advance, except three millions. Seven hundred ' and ten millions of stocks were due in the current year. The troops were not paid, commerce was ruined, and whole provinces were depopulated. The Regent was urged to proclaim the crown bankrupt. The Regent declared that he should be dishonored, and that France would be dishonored, by such a course. In place of it he attempted every half way measure known in his time, or indeed, since, to insolvent states or failing merchants. When it is remembered, that in fourteen years the expenses of the monarchy had been two billions of livres more than the revenue, and that this amount had been borrowed ; that the arrears, when the King died, were seven hundred and eleven millions, and the deficit on the year then current was seventy-eight millions ; when it is also remembered that Law's plans, such as they were, maintained the credit of the crown for five years ; the injustice will be seen of that sweeping charge, which says that the public bankruptcy of France was the consequence of those schemes. When the Regent came into power he had placed the Duke de Noailles at the head of the department of finance. To this department he referred Law and his plans. Law proposed ceptance in a public bank, which should collect the revenues, carry on the great monopolies, issue bills current as money, and discount notes of merchants and others who wished to borrow. The Council of Finance rejected this proposal, and Law substituted a private bank of discount, on a basis which seems modest to later times. The cap ital was six million livres, divided into twelve hundred shares. It was authorized to discount merchants' notes, and to issue bills re deemable in coin. The Duke of Orleans accepted the title of Patron of the bank, which was opened in Law's own house. So necessary were these simple bank facilities, in the disordered commerce of France, that the bank at once became popular Higtory of and acquired credit. At the end of a year Law's predic- ^^K*- tions were fulfilled, and he was able to take a second step. The gov ernment, also, could give him its countenance, by a decree ordering 1 The value of a livre varies, from time to time, especially as it is a paper livre or made of silver. But the reader of our time may remember to advantage, that, in 1700, the word represented, in substance, what the word " franc " stands for now. VOL. ii. 34 530 THE MISSISSIPPI SCHEME. [CHAP. XXII. public officials to receive the notes of the bank, as if they were coin. From this time, of course, they answered all purposes of exchange within the kingdom. With such facilities the notes instantly gained value, the deposits of gold and silver increased, and the bank was on the high road of prosperity. Its notes even commanded one per cent, more than specie, at times, for the government was not above tam pering with specie ; but the bank redeemed its notes in the coin it received. The trade of the country felt the benefit to commerce of such a currency. Taxes were paid cheerfully, and branches of the bank, in accordance with Law's original plan, were established in five provincial cities. A second feature of Law's great scheme had been the management of the great commercial monopolies, which made, at that time, a part N. l/ Cent livrcj Tournou ^ A $ANQUEprojnet payer au Porteur a viie Cent Irvres Tournois en Efpeces d'Argent , valeur rcceue A Parts le premier Janvier mil vm?t. ^N nelhn Si&$> f 1%$% JBwrgeois '^C^otxteffrTTsr 2)u#rf/T^\ ^^^^n.aM^ ^ > Fac-simile of Bank-note issued by Law. of the commercial system of all the great nations. He was now tempted to engraft this part of that plan upon his private bank. And it is from that temptation, and the plans made in consequence, that Law became the founder of New Orleans, and, practically, the person who directed the French settlement of the valley of the Mis- Formation sissippi. Crozat, who had obtained the grant of the Missis- " f western s ippi trade for twelve years, had not been successful in his company." pi anSi f or reasons which have been stated. He asked per mission to give up his privilege, and Law gladly became his successor. It seems as if Crozat had attempted commerce only, with hopes of success in mining, while Law, with a broader view, expected to make 1717.] THE WESTERN COMPANY. 531 the colonists at least support themselves by agriculture. The con tract for the trade in beaver in Canada expired in 1717. Law, there fore, asked permission to form a company, which should unite all the commerce of Louisiana with the fur trade of Canada. The Regent granted all that he asked, in an edict issued in August, 1717. The company thus formed received the name of the " Western Company." The grants made to it were for twenty-five years. The sovereignty over all Louisiana was granted to it, on the condition of homage to the king of France, and of a gold crown at the beginning of every new reign. This token of vassalage indicates the nature of the hopes with which it was undertaken. The capital was nominally one hundred million livres. But subscribers were permitted to pay three fourths of their subscriptions in royal bonds, which were still at the old discount of seventy or eighty per cent. Only one fourth of the subscription was asked for in coin. It will be seen, therefore, that the real capital paid in was about forty million livres. New Orleans in 1719 (from an old Map) With this capital Law and his associates went to work with spirit in the details of colonization. We can still refer to the little emigration tracts which they circulated through France and Germany to collect emigrants. Vessels were armed, troops sent forward, and colonists enlisted. The great feudal cultivators of France did not encourage the emigration of peasants. The emigrants, therefore, were not so often as might have been wished, persons used to agriculture. They were indeed enlisted largely by the i e 11 i -, i Bienville nope or collecting gold, then, as now, the hope most governor. r The settle- tempting to a poor and discouraged people. M. de L Ep- mentof New r r Orleans. may was recalled, and Law showed his good sense and knowledge of the position by appointing Bienville Governor-general of Louisiana. Bienville was also instructed, probably by an echo of ad vice given by himself, to select a new site for the capital. With the ' 532 THE MISSISSIPPI SCHEME. [CHAP. XXII. % knowledge he had acquired of the geography of his dominions, he chose the admirable site of New Orleans, commanding the approaches to the sea by the river and by Lake Pontchartrain, and here in Feb ruary, 1718, he left fifty persons to clear the ground and to build. Through the year different vessels arrived with colonists for different landowners, in one party alone eight hundred persons. The next year two of Bienville's brothers arrived with news of the short Spanish war, set on foot by the folly of Alberoni. With great promptness Governor Bienville moved against the Spanish port of Pensacola, and took it. It was soon retaken by a superior force, but was again captured by a French squadron in September. Mean while, without check from the war, John Law was going forward with apparent success in his great schemes. The Western Com pany, as the charter called his corporation, had not at first attracted much public attention. But its shares gradually rose to par, that is, to a money par, though they had been largely paid for in reduced securities. In May, 1719, he was strong enough in public confi dence to obtain from the Regent power to join with it the East India Company of France. The exclusive right of trading beyond the Cape of Good Hope was given to it. Its name was changed to that of " The Indian Company," and, for its new purposes, it was authorized to issue fifty thousand new shares at a par of five hundred livres. But the company was already so prosperous that it refused even to- The Indian issue these new shares at less than five hundred and twenty company, liyres, fifty livres down, and the remainder in twenty equal monthly payments. Nor was any person permitted to take one new share who did not exhibit four old ones. Old shares, therefore, rose rapidly under the new enthusiasm. This condition brought them from three hundred livres up to seven hundred and fifty livres, that is, they rose from sixty per cent, of their nominal value to fifty per cent, above it. It was at this crisis, when the Western Company became the Indian Company, that it really won the bad name which from that moment to this has hung around the " Mississippi Scheme," so called. 1 A capital of forty million livres was not an extraordinary sum with which to develop the fur trade of Canada, and all the re sources of the Mississippi Valley. The methods of the Company for its legitimate business, even in the midst of stockbroking in Paris, were judicious, though they were not so considerable as its capital would have justified. Concessions of land, as they were called, were 1 Which has seemed to attend subsequent financial transactions which bore the same- name. 1719.] THE MISSISSIPPI SCHEME. 533 made to adventurers under the Company, and these adventurers sent out settlers, as the Company itself did. In 1718, seven ves- Progreg , of sels were sent out with stores and emigrants, numbering in ^te" 011 - all, perhaps, fifteen hundred persons. The year 1719 sent eleven ships, besides those ships of war belonging to the crown, which as sisted in the operations against Pensacola. Meanwhile new establish ments for trade were opened on the Red River, the Missouri, and the Upper Mississippi. 1 In this year five hundred negroes from the Guinea Coast were brought in, and another cargo arrived the next year. A terrible epidemic, contracted at St. Domingo, where the ves sels always stopped, swept through the emigrants of 1720. From one vessel, one man, who was set on shore at his own request, was the only person who ever arrived ; the ship itself was never heard of again. In 1721 nearly a thousand white emigrants arrived, and thirteen hundred and sixty-seven slaves were brought from Guinea, not three quarters of the poor wretches who were embarked for the voyages. In this year the Graronne, belonging to the Company, with supplies and three hundred German emigrants, was taken by pirates near St. Domingo. This year, however, the most active of the operations of the Com pany, as far as Louisiana was concerned, was the last of its prosperity at home. The popularity gained by the union of the East and West India Companies in August, 1719, was so great, and the demand so flattering for the consolidated stock, that Law was able to advance another step towards his original design, and to undertake, by the Company, the payment of a considerable part of that ter rible public debt, with which the Regent's administration sissippi had found itself saddled by the later wars of Louis the Mag nificent. In exchange for the privilege of collecting the revenue of France, he proposed to take up, by the issue of company stock, gov ernment stock to the amount of more than fifteen hundred millions, a considerable part of which was approaching maturity. The plan was gigantic, but it offered unquestionable advantages. If so large an enterprise could have been carried out with the privacy and deli cate handling necessary, it seems to have rested on an intelligible and practicable basis. In fact the new shares which Law issued, of which nine tenths were to be paid in government stock, were sought with overwhelming eagerness. This means, partly, that the French people went crazy. But it also means, partly, that people trusted John Law and his business-like methods of administration more than they did 1 In the Yazoo country, at Baton Rouge, at Bayagoula, at Ecores Blancs, at Point Cou- pee, at the Black River, at Pascagoula, and among the Illinois. All these plantations proved permanent. 534 THE MISSISSIPPI SCHEME. [CHAP. XXII. the Regent Orleans and the men around him. For the real question was, whether the holders of government securities would or would not exchange them for his securities, when they could do so, if they would add a payment of one ninth of the amount in cash, for all which they would receive his bonds, or those of his company. The speculators and the capitalists of France alike, chose to make the change. And this is the cause of the frenzy, in which all France combined to give, for a moment, an exaggerated value to the bonds of the India Com pany. It was not the possession of the whole valley of the Missis sippi. Land is as valueless in itself in any market, as is the ocean A Caricature of the Time of tne " Mississippi Bubble." or the clouds. It needs the occupancy of men men who know how to subdue the earth before it has a money value. If the Indian Company could have given this element of value to their empire on the Mississippi, it would have been worth the whole debt of France a hundred times told. But such inhabitancy, or such a population, is not to be gained by any inducements which such companies can offer. For the moment, however, the public enthusiasm supplied the place .of more substantial values. Three hundred thousand new shares were applied for, where there were but fifty thousand to distribute. The enlargement of currency, accompanied by universal confidence, quick- \ 1719.] SPECULATION AT ITS HEIGHT. 535 ened every form of industry. The annual taxes were reduced by fifty-two million livres in the year 1719, while thirty-five J " Momentary millions had been taken off before, since the Regents acces- effectsofthe plan. Law sion to power. The rate of interest fell, lands rose in price, at the height of power. labor found its reward, and plenty appeared everywhere. The author of such wonders was hailed as a demi-god ; the crowds fol lowed him, the nobility courted him, the Regent honored and obeyed him. To John Law, the Scotch goldsmith's son, poor France 6wed the one gleam of prosperity which she had enjoyed for twenty years. It is said that in the three years of its power in Louisiana, the Indian Company expended twenty-five million of francs. It would probably be impossible to say what this immense sum was expended for. La Harpe, a very competent authority, testifies that eight million francs only were expended on supplies and transportation for the col ony, and he avers that this sum brought no return to France. He says that convicts and prostitutes were sent out as colonists ; that inexperienced clerks were put in charge of the stores and plundered them openly ; that the Company did not hold to its contracts with Swiss and German companies, and with miners ; that these contracts themselves were unfortunate ; that it was always making places for adventurers, and always quarrelling with Bienville. All this is said more simply, when we say that a company of directors in Paris under took to rule a colony in America. Napoleon has taught us TheCom . that two good generals are worse than one bad one. When E^^ 1 " a directory of generals is on one side of the world, and their uma - army is on the other, its ruin is certain. It is a curious question, whether under a careful management, that part of the capital of the Company which was subscribed for the develop ment of Louisiana, could, in these days, have been made productive. An annual income of four per cent, would have satisfied the share holders. Their privilege ran for twenty-five years, and when it reverted to the crown, the separate holders could take lands to represent the principal. It is certain that the furs of Canada and of Louisiana would not amount to Arms of the We ste company. an annual value of one million six hundred thousand livres. Indeed, the Company relied, net so much on furs, as on mines and tobacco. They never found any mines of value, and the product of tobacco was inconsiderable. So far their empire in the West yielded them but little. If, however, the Company had been willing to do as Winthrop and his associates did, go themselves with their charter to the province of which it made them masters, it could not have been 536 THE MISSISSIPPI SCHEME. [CHAP. XXII. hard to make that province worth forty millions francs before 1742. But no man of the stockholders, though the examples were before them of Winthrop, of Champlain, of Penn, and other colonists, had, at any moment, any such idea. Whatever may have been the legitimate basis on which Law's earlier plans were founded, all recollection of it was swept Wildspecu- i n i i r <> i latiouinthe away and all thought of any basis was forgotten in the whirlwind of excitement which swept over France, when all men tried to join in the successes of those whose early investments in Indian stocks had proved fortunate beyond the wildest hope. Under this wild excitement shares .issued at 500 livres eventually sold at 5,000 livres, and even more. In its five issues, the Company put out 624,000 shares, which at the nominal par amounted to 312,000,000 livres. To pay four per cent, interest on these, would have required 12,480,000 livres annually. It is an interesting fact that its income was more than six times this amount, being 80,500,000 livres annu ally. The Company was therefore amply able to make good its tech nical obligations. But, of course, persons who had bought for 5,000 livres a share nominally worth 500, would not be satisfied with a miserable annual income of twenty livres for that investment. The price of shares was merely fanciful. It could not be held at the ficti tious level. And the moment the decline began, nothing would arrest it. These statements are due to the memory of John Law. He un doubtedly made the grossest errors in his efforts to arrest the fall of these securities. But it was, in the first instance, not the audacity of his proposals, but their success, which caused his ruin. Ruin came. So soon as the holders of shares began to buy with them houses and castles and jewels, and did not buy other company * shares, so soon as they ceased to speculate and began to invest in real securities, so soon the price of bonds fell. All the ingenuity and all the audacity of Law, all the willing help of the unscrupulous Regent could not arrest the fall, more than they could make water run up hill. In one year from the greatest success of the " system," as this rash adventure was called, it had wholly disap peared. In that time thousands had become rich who were poor, thousands were poor who had been rich. Law fled from Paris, and all his estates were sequestered. 1 This was in November, 1720. News of his fall and flight arrived in Louisiana on the 15th of April, 1721. The year 1721, however, saw the largest accession yet made of emigrants to the colony. 1 For an admirable account of all Law's transactions, examined in the light of modern financial science, such as it is, see M. Thiers's chapters, translated into English with illus trations, by Frank S. Fiskc. 1721.] VOYAGE OF FATHER CHARLEVOIX. 531 As the " system " rolled on, adding one extravagance to another, it was announced that Law had become a Roman Catholic. Whatever may have been the sincerity of this conversion, it was followed by his appointment as minister of finance, and men said he had become a Catholic that he might become a minister. It was perhaps this con version which gave rise to the first measures of the Company for assist ing the religious missions in Louisiana, missions to which, in the out set, France owed even her knowledge of the river. Pierre Francois Xavier de Charlevoix, the writer to whom we have since Voya geof owed our most interesting history of New France in that Charlevoix - century, who was indeed the diligent historian of Jesuit enterprise View on the Arkansas River. through the world, embarked at Rochelle, in July, 1720, to visit the Canadian Missions. He was at Kaskaskia, in our State of Illinois, in November 8, 1721. The brethren of his order had already established a post here, six miles from the Mississippi. He went from this point down the river in a canoe made from a long walnut tree. Thirty miles above the mouth of the Arkansas he found the village already in ruins where Law was to have established, on his own concession, 1 nine thousand Germans from the Palatinate. All who came were discouraged, and eventually planted what is now known as the " Ger man Coast " above New Orleans. No part of the world shows more beautiful homes and farms than those made there by these exiles who were then thought to be abandoned to misery. Charlevoix found that 1 The concession was twelve miles square. 588 THE MISSISSIPPI SCHEME. [CHAP. XXII. the small-pox was already ravaging tribes which La Salle had found numerous. He arrived at Natchez, on the loth of December, and at New Orleans on the 31st. It is amusing now to see, that the little circle of critics in New Orleans thought, that, if he had chosen, he could have found his way to the Western Ocean. 1 That enterprise was reserved to Lewis and Clarke, nearly a hundred years after, and occupied them then more than two years. The Jesuit missionary proved his own good sense, and made good his Christian profession, by reconciling Bienville the Governor, and Hubert, one of the other officers, who were in one of the chronic quarrels which embittered life in the petty colony. Charlevoix, like the other early explorers, sent home accounts of the resources and geography of the country, which are amus- eariy ex- ing when read by the light of our modern knowledge. We have seen that La Salle proposed to establish his colony as an easy method by which the French could attack the Spanish silver mines. La Harpe, one of the most valuable officers who served under Bienville, in a report which he pre sented at home, urged the necessity of keeping the English away from these same silver mines -of New Mexico. And in Charlevoix's first letter describing the resources of the new colony, the two productions which he describes with most enthu siasm are the " apalacchine " and the wax of the candleberry. The first of these is already wholly for gotten. It is the Ilex Cassine of the botanists, and, at the time Charlevoix wrote, had a reputation as a substitute for tea, and even as dispelling the emotion of fear. iiex Cassine (Yaupan). There will be many, even among the American readers of these lines, who have never heard of candleberry wax, which Charlevoix supposed was to be an important article of foreign export. Those who ever have made a candle from it, will sympathize with the " five or six slaves," who being unfit for ordi nary duty, were thought by the good father sufficient to gather a shipload of wax every year. i By a curious parody on this criticism, the biographical dictionaries, French and Eng lish, say that Chateaubriand, at the end of the eighteenth century, crossed from the Mis sissippi to the Pacific, an impossible journey in the period of his tour. 1721.] THE FRENCH AND INDIANS. 539 The city of New Orleans, so named in honor of the Regent, was regularly laid out on paper when Charlevoix visited it, on JUT-T. j r> \t--t- the convenient plan made by La lour and ranger, but it was still a city on paper. There were two hundred people encamped there, who were to carry out the plans of the engineers. To each applicant a lot was given sixty feet in front by twice that depth. Each landholder was directed to fence in his lot and to leave a vacant space, three feet wide, for open drains which should carry off superficial water. These ditches were connected, and a "dyke or levee of earth made on the river side. The seat of government was removed thither in the same year, and the names of the two hundred settlers whom Charlevoix found there, are preserved. Bienville's is first upon the roll. The result in America of the work of the Western Company, or the Indian Company, had been the establishment of a few thousand emigrants in a climate to which they were not accustomed, on soil of whose capacities they were ignorant, with hopes which could not be gratified. A staff of officials, larger than would be appointed now for the same region, though its population is counted for millions, quarrelled among themselves, but regularly drew their salaries. The common-sense and practical intelligence of Bienville were the most cheerful. element in the horoscope of the infant state. The French establishment at Natchez was the most flourishing of the trading establishments on the river. The massacre by The settle- the Natchez Indians of almost all its male inhabitants, was mentof the first terrible event which broke the course of the de velopment of the colony, and the vengeance taken upon that tribe was the first great effort made by the colonists against the natives. The policy of La Salle had been to conciliate the natives of all tribes. He would not permit his men to fire upon them, except under extreme provocation, and he would not adopt the easy policy, which was a favorite policy with the Spaniards, of taking one side or an other in their mutual feuds. DTberville and Bienville seem to have been willing to continue in a policy of conciliation. But, from the beginning, it was the custom of the French to supply the Indians with guns, powder, and shot. They relied on the Indians of the north for hunting, as the supply of furs to Europe made the largest element in their trade, and they boldly took the risk that such arms might be used against themselves. So long as the charge of the outposts was entrusted to officers of humanity or discretion, this hazardous policy, which armed the In dians as well as the whites, brought few disastrous consequences. All parties regarded themselves as adventurers, and the loss of one life, 540 THE MISSISSIPPI SCHEME. [CHAP. XXII. more or less, in a brawl with savages was not regarded so seriously French poi- aS ifc would have been in the earlier settlements of New IhVSn*. En g land - As earl J as 1716, some Indians of the Natchez tribe, or allies of theirs, had killed some voyageurs coming down the river. Bienville suspected that they had been instigated to this atrocity by English traders from the Carolinas. He took resolute measures. He seized on some of the Natchez chiefs, and gave the tribe to understand that he would take the lives of these men if the heads of the murderers were not sent to him. After some intrigue and wavering, caused partly by their doubt of his firmness perhaps, and partly by real inability to meet so hard an order, it was complied with in full. From this moment the Brother of the Sun, as the chief of the Natchez was called, must have felt that he had a master. This transaction is known in the colonial history as the first Natchez war. of the Mississippi at Natchez. So far as we can see, the Natchez might have been retained, as a useful ally of the French, for an indefinite period, but for the folly and selfishness of one French commander, named Chopart. The tribe The Natchez waa m o re compactly organized than most of the Indian tribe. tribes. It understood subordination to its chiefs, and, in deed, in many other regards, showed a higher civilization than that of most of the Indian nations. The conjecture has always seemed probable that it was an off-shoot from that superior Mexican race, the civilization of which, as described in the exaggerated accounts of the 1722.] THE NATCHEZ INDIANS. 54 J companions of Cortez, is still one of the problems and wonders of his tory. The Natchez worshipped the sun. His temple was of oval shape, built of clay, without windows, and arched in a dome. It was about one hundred feet in circumference, and, to defend it from the rain, was covered with three layers of woven mats. Above it were three wooden eagles, one red, one white, one yellow. No person was permitted to live in it, but the Guardian of the Temple had a little shed without, where he lodged. The whole was surrounded by a palisade on which were exposed the skulls which had been brought back from battle. In this temple a perpetual fire was kept, supplied from time to time by the Guardian of the Temple. It was his duty to feed the fire with logs, to see that they did not blaze, and that the fire did not go out. The palace of the great chief, who took the name of the Brother of the Sun, was similar to the temple. It was raised on an artificial mound, that he might the better converse with his emmentand brother in the heavens every morning. The door of the palace fronted the east, and, when the sun arose, his brother saluted him with howls, ordered that his calumet should be lighted, offered to him the three first puffs of smoke, and raising his hands, and turning from east to west, directed his course for that day through the heavens. On the death of the supreme chief his sister's son succeeded. The princesses of the blood espoused none but men of obscure family, and had the right of dismissing a husband whenever they pleased. The power of the Brother of the Sun was absolute; no man would refuse him his head if he asked for it, and if he appointed a guard to wait upon the French, none of these men were permitted to receive any wages. He had a sort of body-guard, or personal staff, appointed even at his birth. For, so soon as an heir presumptive was born, a certain number of infants was chosen from the infants of the tribe near his age, and these were assigned for the service of the young prince. They hunted, fished, planted, and farmed for him, they were his servants, and they furnished his table. That they might serve him in another world, they all sacrificed themselves to follow him, when he died. In a religious rite of great solemnity they were strangled that they might go at once to be his servants in the world of spirits. All these customs, and many others, described in the early writers, are analogous to those ascribed in the Spanish writers to the Mexican tribes. Charlevoix observed bas-relief carvings, " not so badly done as one expects," among the chiefs of a neighboring tribe. The Natchez were not disposed to make war, but for some reason, perhaps because of the small-pox which their new friends gave 542 THE MISSISSIPPI SCHEME. [CHAP. XXII. them, their numbers diminished rapidly after the arrival of the French, or were supposed to do so. It was thought that they were more numerous in La Salle's day than when Iberville landed ; and, in 1722, Charlevoix thought they had diminished in six years from four thousand to two thousand fighting men. They were fond of the French, and the French found them very useful. Opposite to their town, the French had established a post which bore the name of Rosalie, a name still preserved. It was given by Bienville in compli ment to Mad. la Duchesse de Pontchartrain. The convenience for trade, the excellence of the soil, and the beauty of the situation, which is exquisite, called up a very considerable number of whites, and, as has been said, this was the most successful settlement in the valley. After the "first Natchez war," for nearly ten years this beautiful village showed every sign of external prosperity. But for the folly and selfishness of Chopart, the commander, this prosperity might have continued. Chopart formed the idea, which seems almost insane, that he should chopart ' 8 l^ e ^ ie s ^ e ^ * ne g reat village of the Natchez for his own madness home, and that the fine plain about it would be an admi rable plantation for himself. He had the effrontery to send for the Brother of the Sun, and to tell him that the great chief of the French had ordered the Natchez to leave this village, as he needed it. The. chief and council refused indignantly. They said that the nation had long possessed this territory, and that it was sacred. The very ashes of their fathers were buried beneath the temple. They reminded him that till now all the points occupied by the French in their territory had been given in token of regard, or had been bought and paid for. Chopart was deaf to their arguments. He insisted that in two months' time they must be ready to remove. The wily Natchez pretended, after deliberation, to assent to his mad demand. Chopart even made them agree to pay an indemnity in compensation for the extension of time. In fact, however, the Natchez agreed, in secret council, that they would by one fell stroke get rid of the French, and that pians"of n forever. They sent messengers to the other Indian tribes to bind them to the same work of destruction. Nor did any tribe refuse so far as to betray them. The Choctaws joined eagerly in the plan, and took, as their part, the destruction of the French on the lower part of the river. To make sure that the massacre should take place on the same day, at all the lower settlements the Choctaw chief and the Natchez chief exchanged parcels of little sticks, in each of which were as many twigs as would indicate the number of days before that appointed for the butchery. This had been fixed at the 1729.] THE NATCHEZ INDIANS. 543 time when Chopart had directed the abandonment of the village and the temple. The fatal night came on without any preparation on the part of the French to oppose the Indians. Women from the Natchez tribe, more faithful to their French lovers, or to those who are so called, than to their race, warned them of their danger. Some of these men com municated the warning to Chopart, but- he ridiculed their fears, ar rested them and put them in irons. He had just returned from a visit of state to the Brother of the Sun. The Indians had well kept their horrible secret, all parties had drunk and revelled together, and it was not till three in the morning that Chopart returned, received the report of danger, ordered the men to be ironed who brought it, and then retired to sleep off the effects of his debauch, warning Chopart and the Indian Envoys. the sentinel not to call him till nine in the morning. This was on the 28th of November, 1729. Morning came. There was not a settler's house but had in it one or more Indians, who came in on one pretence or another. The great chief set out from his village, attended by his terrene* warriors, beating the drum of ceremony, and bearing the 8 calumet aloft. The calumet, as La Salle had seen, may be a cal umet of war as well as of peace. The pretence of the procession was that they might bring to Chopart the tribute exacted in pay ment for delay. They reached his house and wakened him. He came out in his robe de chambre, and bade the cortege enter. They did so and offered their tribute. They then proceeded to .the river, where a galley just up from New Orleans was unloading valuable stores. Every Indian in the train picked out his man among those 544 THE MISSISSIPPI SCHEME. [CHAP. XXII. at work on the galley, fired, and killed him. The discharge was the signal agreed upon. All through the settlement the Indians closed on the French, and in an hour's time more than two hundred l French men were killed. Of the garrison, which consisted of one small com pany, only one soldier escaped. Most of the women and children were spared, to be held as slaves. But some of the women were killed in the effort to defend their husbands. Chopart was among the last to be killed. He saw the slaughter, Death of but saw ^ ^ l&ke. He fled to his garden, not so much as ohopart. seizing a gun. He whistled for his soldiers, but, they were not left to hear. He was surrounded by Indians. But no Natchez would lay hands on him. He was a dog, they said, unworthy to be killed by a brave. 'A Puant chief was called, who killed him with a club. 2 Had the simple arithmetic of the Natchez and Choctaws proved as accurate as they expected, that day would probably have been the last of the whole colony. But if, in the best calculations of the greatest, a little dog may do more mischief than he can conceive, what must not be expected in the computations of ignorant savages ? It hap pened that one day when the Natchez chief burned his fatal stick in the temple, his little son stood by. While the father's attention was engaged elsewhere, the boy, with a child's passion for imitation, burned two sticks, as he had seen his father burn one, without being observed. In consequence of this accident, the Natchez pounced upon their prey two days earlier than the day fixed upon in their solemn treaty. With all the facilities of modern skill, the traveller is a long day in descending the Mississippi, even on the flood, from Natchez to New Orleans. The distance, in a direct line, is more than a hundred miles, and, by the winding of the river, it is twice as far. The poor fugi tives from Natchez had no means of carrying the intelligence of the massacre to New Orleans in the fatal two days which were left to that post. When, therefore, on the appointed day, the first of December, . six hundred of the Choctaws assembled in force by the Lake of St. Louis, Perier, the governor, had no notice of what had taken place above. The Choctaws sent to him a delegation, saying that they had come to present to him the calumet. Perier was alive to the advan tage of conciliating this important tribe ; but he was too good a sol dier to admit them inside his fortifications. He sent a civil message, that he would gladly receive the chief with thirty of his warriors. This answer disconcerted the Choctaws, and seems to have been enough 1 This number corresponds best with what we know of the colony. But Dumont says seven hundred. 2 The Puants were Indians from Green Bay, now in Wisconsin. 1729.] T.HE EXPEDITION AGAINST THE NATCHEZ. 545 to avert an immediate attack. They sent a delegation to the Natchez to present the calumet to the great chief. The delegation was not received with such honor as was expected. They soon learned that the Natchez had made their attack two days before that agreed upon. What was worse, perhaps, in the presents which they received, from the plunder then taken by " the Brother of the Sun," there were no guns, powder, or balls. The Choctaws were indignant at all this, and turned their rage against the Natchez. They accused them of selfishly anticipating the assault, that they might gain all the benefits. They forbade them to kill any of their captives, lest they should have to account for such lost lives to the Choctaws. Meanwhile, on the third of December, fugitives who had escaped the slaughter, arrived at New Orleans. Perier acted with The news promptness. He sent an officer to communicate with the * New or- Choctaws, and, before long, had succeeded in engaging these fickle savages on his side. He formed a little army, and, with his new allies, moved against the Nat chez. The nego tiations and prepa rations consumed the months of De cember and Janu ary, but, in Feb ruary, the Choc taws arrived at Natchez, sixteen hundred in num ber. The French contingent joined them in March, and the fort of the Natchez was in vested. They did not stand a siege in which cannon were to be served against their palisades. They agreed to surren der their prisoners and to make peace on those terms. Loubois, the French commander, on the spot, acceded to these terms, without meaning to keep them, having a theory that he was not bound to keep faith with them, more than they would with him. The next morning, therefore, after he had received the prisoners, he prepared to renew the siege. But he found that the Natchez did not trust him VOL. ii. 35 Costumes of French Soldiery early in the Eighteenth Century. 540 THE MISSISSIPPI SCHEME. . [CHAI-. XXII. any more than he deserved, and that they had abandoned their town. The main body of the tribe kept together, and, after one or two efforts to surprise the fort at Natchez, moved up the Red River, and made an attempt on that at Natehitoches. But St. Denis, the com mander, was too watchful for them. The same summer, Perier, find ing himself reinforced by three companies of marines from France, made a final movement up the river. He found the Natchez in their last retreat, attacked them and compelled them to surrender. In truth, two hundred of them, of whom most were women, were taken prisoners, and were sold as slaves to the plantations at St. Domingo. Three hundred escaped, and found asylum among the tribes which hated the French. At this day, among the Creek Indians, who now cultivate the fertile lands reserved to that tribe in the upper valleys of the Washita River, there are three hundred or more good citizens who speak the Natchez language, and trace their descent back to the vassals of the " Brother of the Sun." 1 The poor Natchez, however, in their untimely insurrection, achieved more than they knew. For when the news of the destruction of the only promising post on the river reached Paris, the Western Com pany, quite discouraged, represented to the king their loss, and returned to him their unprofitable right in the colony. The king, very wisely, appointed Bienville its governor again, in the place of Perier, and Bienville's last administration began. He arrived at New Orleans in 1734 ; Perier, who had been promoted to be lieutenant-general, resigned the government and returned to Europe. The surrender by the Western Company marks the miserable fail- Failure of ure f th e ld system of giving the business of colonization compass over i* 1 * * ne oversight of favored boards of men who did not system. m ean to emigrate. After thirty years of nursing, after all the energy of Law's movements, and the large sums of money which had been expended on the colony, its population, when it was returned to the king, was estimated at only five thousand. Of these, nearly two thousand were negroes. The whole number was scattered among eleven posts. Fourteen years later, a careful census showed even a smaller number, so that this estimate of five thousand, even, was probably exaggerated. In 1745, there were but seventeen hundred white men, fifteen hundred women, and two thousand and twenty slaves, of whom the Illinois had about three hundred white men, the Missouri posts two hundred, and Natchez, which had been the most attractive settlement of all, only eight white men and fifteen negro slaves. It must be remembered, therefore, that we are still tracing 1 See Gallatin's Synopsis, Arch. Am., vol. ii., p. 114. 1736.] BIENVILLE'S EXPEDITION. 547 chronicles which derive their interest only from the results which were to grow from petty beginnings, and not from the numbers engaged, or, indeed, even from the personal characteristics of most of the actors. Bienville probably wished to show, that if he had been commander, the savages would not have come off so well as they did Bienville > 8 under Perier's administration. He demanded of the Chick- ag-lif^tthe asaws that they should surrender the Natchez. The Chick- Chlcka8aws asaws had by this time cemented alliances with the English of Caro lina, they were confident of their own power, and they sent back word to Bienville that the Natchez and they now formed one nation, and that they should not comply with his demand. Bienville then determined to attack the Chickasa'ws. He sent orders to D'Artag- nette, who commanded the fort at Kaskaskia, among the Illinois, to Bienville's Army on the River. meet him in person on the 10th of May, 1736, in the Chickasaw country, with the largest army he could muster from Illinois Indians, French troops, and settlers. Bienville himself proposed to lead an army from New Orleans and Mobile. The expedition thus set in motion was by far the most formidable which the little colony ever attempted. Bienville's contingent made its rendezvous at Mobile. On Easter Day, the 1st of April, it moved" up the Mobile River in a fleet of thirty piraguas and as many batteaux. On the 20th he reached a point which he called Tombecbe, which is the Jones's Bluff of the Little Tombigbee River of the Alabama geography of to-day. Hither he had sent an advance guard, the year before, to 548 THE MISSISSIPPI SCHEME. [CHAP. XXII build a fort. The Choctaws met him there with the calumet, and received the tribute, for so they began to regard it, in considera tion of which they served as auxiliaries. On the 4th of May, the Hisexpe- army, thus reinforced, reem barked and proceeded slowly up the river, and, on the 24th disembarked for the last time, and then began the construction of a palisade and shed for the pro tection of its stores. The enemy was in a stockade fort, seven miles distant, built upon a hill, surrounded by the cabins of an Indian village. The fort was built of heavy timbers a foot in diameter : it was circular in shape, with three rows of loop holes. The Chickasaws were .not only pro tected by the logs, but stood in pits or trenches which covered all but the upper parts of their bodies. They kept silence, and let the French come within good musket shot before they fired. As the French ap proached they saw Englishmen whom they supposed to be allies of the Chickasaws. The stockade proved to be quite too strong to be taken by storm, as Bienville had proposed. After a loss of nearly one hundred and twenty, very severe for so small a force, he was obliged to withdraw his men, without producing the least effect on the enemy. 1 He spent the night in his camp, but on the next day he had the grief of seeing that his men, who had been left dead on the field, had been cut to pieces by the Chickasaws, who had exposed the quar tered bodies on the palisades in derision. A rumor was spread that The French D'Artagnette, with the Illinois contingent, was approach- repulsed. ' n g g ut Bi env iu e } ia( j no sucn good fortune. He returned to his camp on the Tombigbee, not much molested on his retreat. His attack was made on the 2Gth of May. Poor D'Artagnette had, in fact, with military precision, arrived in time to make the junction contemplated in his orders. He reached the Chickasaw country on the 9th of May, and waited within sight of the enemy till the 20th, but heard no news of Bienville. His Indians murmured, and wished either to retreat or attack. D'Artag nette chose to attack, and did so successfully, 'but while driving the Chickasaws from a second village he was himself wounded. His Indians abandoned him, but a loyal company of forty-eight French men held by him. This force was so small, that he was compelled to surrender, and he and they were prisoners of the Chickasaws at the time when Bienville made his rash and unsuccessful attack. The whole Illinois detachment had been 396 men, of whom 130 were Fate of the French, 38 Iroquois, 38 Arkansas, and 190 Illinois and Mi- pnsoners. amis. So soon as Bienville retreated, the savages took their French prisoners to a plain, tied all but one of them to stakes and 1 This estimate of the loss is that of Du Tortre in a despatch sent to Paris. Dumont's account says the French loss was thirty -two killed, and at least sixty wounded. 1740.J A SECOND EXPEDITION. 549 burned them to death by a slow fire. The whole expedition was a wretched failure, of which the blame seems to rest with Bienville. The Chickasaws never lost the prestige which their success gave them. The historian of Alabama says of them : " The Chickasaws have never been conquered." 1 In 1740 Bienville led another expedition against them by way of the Mississippi river. He moved with thirty-six hundred men, of whom one third were whites and the rest negroes and Indians, from Fort Assumption, which stood near the site of our city of Memphis. This was the largest army which the colony had ever put in the field. The unconquered Chickasaws were frightened, and offered to make peace on condition of surrendering all their white slaves. Bienville assented. He received from them two English prisoners, satisfied himself that they had no French in their hands, and with this concession, withdrew his expedition. The Chickasaws pretended, and the French believed what was probably true, that the Natchez had, for the time, so far withdrawn from their confederacy, that a war against the former tribe did not serve the purpose of vengeance against the latter. The two campaigns certainly did not add to the reputation of Bienville as a military leader. But he retains the reputation of a successful admin istrator of a colony, who had to act often on his own responsibility, who was always separated from his metropolitan masters by an ocean of slow navigation, and often by the frequent wars. He dismissed his auxiliaries with presents. Fort Assumption was razed, and no new military works were erected on its site for one hundred and twenty years. After an absence of more than ten months the army returned to New Orleans. Bienville himself returned to France the next year, and was succeeded by the Marquis de Vaudreuil. Bienville never re turned to America. He died in 1767. In truth Louisiana had succeeded as a royal colony no better than it succeeded under the Western Company. Its officers and garrisons in Bienville's time entailed on the Crown an annual expense of five hundred thousand livres, not a very large sum in current money, but not inconsiderable in the pinched finances of the latter part of the reign of Louis XV. If the figures could be relied on, with which the Western Company gave back their charter to the King in June, 1731, its population was then five thousand on the Mississippi and all its affluents, beside two thousand slaves. A census campaign of taken fifteen years later showed a population of only four thousand whites, of whom eight hundred were the troops in the gar risons. These figures would show even a decrease in the years of the Royal administration. Twenty years later, under the careful admin- 1 Pickett's Alabama. 550 THE MISSISSIPPI SCHEME. [CHAP. XXII. , Louis XV. .istration of Ulloa, a census showed a population of 5,526 whites, and about as many blacks. It was not unnatural that Louis XV. should care but little for his namesake, which, after half a century of nursing, had shown such incon siderable growth, and gave so little visible promise of im provement. An army of eight hundred men to protect four times their number of settlers gave indeed but little hope for any permanent establishment of value. The Marquis de Vaudreuil was appointed Bienville's successor, and he filled the post of Royal Governor at New Orleans for eight years, whence he was transferred to Canada. He was in fear that the English would atta-ck him by sea, as through the Choctaw allies of the Carolinians and Georgians they threatened him by land. Under more vigorous lead the English would have done so. But no English fleet attempted to force his petty for tifications. By land, his people were, again and again, in terror of attack from the Choctaws of the English party. At one time Vaud reuil was inspecting his post at Mobile, so that the colony at New Orleans was without its chief. On the German Coast so called, on vaudreuii's the river, and indeed close to the little city, the Choctaws wTthtoe killed one and another Frenchman. Vaudreuil returned to Choctaws. g nc i t jj e c i t y m di sma y. He sent out detachments of re gulars, militia, and friendly Indians, on every side. His strategy was successful, and was rewarded by the capture of the whole Choctaw army, excepting two men. The others, only eleven in number, were brought prisoners to the city, and the Marquis's satisfaction for such a victory was of course chastened by his mortification for the terror of his subordinates. In 1750 that part of the Choctaws who were attached to the French interest obtained a series of crushing victories over the smaller party who were in the English interest, and, by what was known as the Grand Pre" Treaty, extorted such hard terms as to secure for a time peace from their most dreaded enemy. The Chickasaws offered peace also. But Vaudreuil wrote to his government that he did 1752.] PRODUCTIONS OF THE COLONY. 551 not want to make a treaty with them till he had conquered them. In this desire, he was never gratified. In 1751, so great was Vandreuil's consideration at Court, and so desirous was the Court to maintain Louisiana against the English, that he had under his orders two thousand soldiers, a force more than one third of the whole white population of that immense region. With such a force the expenses of the colony of course increased also, and in the last year of his administration they were 930,767 livres. On the 9th of February, 1753, he gave up his place to Capt. Kerlerec of the Navy, and took the command of Canada. The petty victory over the Choctaws which we have mentioned, a series of anxious discussions about the paper currency of a handful tion of Keri- of traders, and the well sustained memoirs in which a large dictions of staff of officers explain how the river should and how it should not be defended, make up the voluminous annals of the col ony during his administration. Meanwhile that conquest of the soil and climate made progress which is so seldom recorded in history, but on which all history of course depends. That commerce in the wax of the candleberry to which Charlevoix had called attention, still attracted interest. One year the king bade Vaudreuil pur chase the whole crop on his account at the rate of ten or twelve livres a pound. A dispatch of a later year says that one planter raised six thousand pounds of the wax, a handsome crop for those days at the rate named. The report says that this is the only lu minary used by the inhabitants. Another report of the year 1752 l speaks of the difficulties of the cotton culture, resulting from the amount of labor necessary to separate seed from fibre, and alludes to a gin which M. Dubreuil, the same planter who had succeeded best with the wax, had invented for that purpose. This unsuccessful gin antedates Eli Whitney's by forty-one years. The manufacture of sugar, sufficient for the needs of the few colonists, was introduced, but afterwards declined. Indigo was cultivated, and eventually became an article of export. There can be no doubt that while the expenses of the crown doubled in the period of Vaudreuil's stewardship, the real prosperity and wealth of the planters were increasing in a larger proportion. Full memoirs preserved in the French Archives show that intelligent men, even then, foresaw in a small degree some part of the immense value which the valley of the Mississippi had in store for the world. It is interesting to see that at a period of scarcity in New Orleans the Illinois farms were already productive enough to supply the distant seaport with bread-stuffs. The culture of silk and tobacco 1 No. 241. Portfolio No. v. Archives de la Marine, Sept. 22, 1752. M. Michel to the minister. 652 THE MISSISSIPPI SCHEME. [CHAP. XXII. is eagerly recommended, and the development of the mines of copper and lead in the northwest, the existence of which was perfectly well known to the officers of the crown. The administration of Kerlerec, as governor, covered ten years. At the end of that time he was recalled to France, and thrown into the Bastile. He was a captain in the French navy, who had distinguished himself in battle. But in the colony he was constantly quarrelling with Rochemore, the intendant of commerce, and his arrest was caused by charges of mal-appropriation of ten millions of livres in four years under the pretence of preparation of war. He held office during the most of the French war of George II.'s reign, and for long periods of that time was left without any direct dispatches from France ; for the English cruisers, who never attacked him directly, were successful in cutting off all his communications. Kerlerec's administration began with high hopes of conciliating the Choctaws. But he soon lost con fidence in them, ancl his reports home, regarding the under officers of the crown, and indeed most of the people, with whom he had to do, were anything but flattering. The army itself was recruited from such worthless material as to give Kerlerec quite as much trouble as the savages whom it was to keep in order. Coins struck in France for the Colonies. The Old Fort at Saint Augustine CHAPTER XXIII. SPANISH COLONIZATION. SPANISH FOOTHOLD IN THE UNITED STATES. SUCCESSIVE ACQUISITIONS BY THE UNITED STATUS. THE FORTUNES OF FLORIDA. BOKDER WARS WITH CAROLINA AND GEORGIA. OGLETHORPE'S EXPEDITIONS. FLORIDA CEDED TO ENGLAND. ITS POPULATION. DISCOVERY OF CALIFORNIA. ORIGIN OF THE NAME. ROMANCE OF ESPLANDIAN. FATHER NICA'S PRETENDED DISCOVERIES. CORO- NADO'S EXPLORATION IN ARIZONA AND NEW MEXICO. DRAKE IN CALIFORNIA. His RECEPTION BY THE INDIANS. LOCALITIES OF HIS DISCOVERIES. THE destiny of the United States Las passed so far under the em pire of institutions which have an English origin, that it is easy to forget how large a portion of her territory has in other times be longed to the Spanish crown. The prevalence of the English lan guage as the language of public procedure in every State and Territory, and the sway, in a very large degree, of English law and the habits of English administration, are enough to keep out of view the fact, that, at one time or another, more than half the present Extent of territory of the United States has been, on the map at least, dominion in subject to the King of Spain. The Spanish claim to Mex- America. ico and the regions north of it, was pressed indefinitely northward. Somewhere on the coast of what we call Oregon, Drake saw the shore in 1579, and he took possession of the country in California for b64 SPANISH COLONIZATION. [CHAP. XX1IT. the English crown as New Albion. But England scarcely asserted her rights under this discovery for centuries. At one and another time since she seized the port of Astoria in 1813, she has made one and another claim to this territory, running back to her rights under Drake's discovery. But the decision which gave to the United States, holding under the Spanish claim, the region south of the line of 49 north latitude, states, quite correctly, the average opinion of the older geographers. 1 On the seacoast of The Pacific the Pacific the Spanish claim resulted from a series of dis coveries and explorations, beginning, as will be seen, when Hernando Cortez discovered California in 1536. In the' interior the eagerness for silver early established colonies of which Santa Fe in New Mexico was the most important of those far to the northward. It is generally supposed, that the droves of wild horses now found through the whole of Western America, as far north as the climate will permit, were of Spanish origin. So far as the natives received any supplies from the workshops of civilization, it was from Spanish traders ; and, to this hour, some fragments of the Spanish language, acquired at a very early period, will be found in their dialect. Eastward of the Rocky Mountains, the Spaniards showed no dispo- spamshpoi- sition to extend their dominion, after the expeditions of De the a'ocky Soto an d Ponce de Leon had seemed to prove that no treas- Mountams. ure Q g^ Qr 8 j] ver was t o be found there. The Spanish government made no protest when, under Louis XIV., the French claimed a right to the whole valley of the Mississippi, founded upon the discoveries of Joliet, Marquette, and La Salle. On the ground, an irritable commander of a Spanish post in Texas might quarrel with an impetuous French officer in a garrison on the Red River. But at home the policy of Spain was well defined ; and if the King of France were willing to keep a line of defence between the English colonies and the Spanish mines, the King of Spain made no objec tion. It was not until the treaty of Paris, in 1763, that the King of France showed that he was tired of this expensive good-nature. He then gave this immense territory to his well-beloved brother of Spain, who showed himself, indeed, somewhat coy about receiving the magnificent but costly present. Twenty years afterward, the Spanish crown gave it back to France, only to learn, in a few months, that France had sold it to the young Republic of America. Florida, from which so much was hoped in the days of Ponce de Leon, had remained in the possession of Spain, after the cruel mas- 1 This claim was reinforced by Gray's discovery of the Columbia River, and Lewis & Clarke's explorntion of it. These discoveries gave to the United States precisely the same sort of rijrht ns that which La Salle's :ave to France, for the valley of the Mississippi. 1819.] FLORIDA. 555 sacres which have been already described. 1 But no discoverer had found gold, or silver, or the fountain of life in Florida. The Spanish posts, therefore, were simply military positions, iards in held to insure the command of the Gulf of Mexico. On the eastern side St. Augustine, without trade, and with but a small civil population, was held by Spain until 1762, when it was ceded to Eng land, to be restored in 1783. By Spain it was ceded to the United States in 1819. On the other side, Pensacola, as has been seen, once and again fell into the hands of the French. Afterwards, with East ern Florida, it fell to the English. But no settlement of Florida followed from either of these establishments. The territories, nomi nally Spanish, thus added to those which were colonized under the flag and protection of England, or under titles derived from her, cover rather more than half of the superficial area of the United States, with the exception of the province of Alaska, recently pur chased from Russia. Of the several parts of this immense domain, the earliest to come under the dominion of the United States, was the western part of the valley of the Mississippi, which was that which came latest under the Spanish flag. In 1819 the United States acquired Florida from Spain, and all her rights on the west ern shore of the continent north of 42 north latitude, comprising the State now known as Oregon, and Washington Territory. In 1845, by a joint resolution, the Congress of the United States an nexed Texas to the Union, and this decision was confirmed by the arbitration of war. The question whether Texas were a part of Louisiana or not, had always been an open question between France and Spain, but it had practically been yielded by France, and in the treaty of 1819 the United States had acquiesced in that decision. By the treaties with Mexico of 1848 and 1853, the dominion of the United States was extended by the acquisition of California and the region now covered by the territory between that State and Texas. We recur now to the earlier history of the Spanish possession of these regions. The reader has already been told 2 of the destruction of the oldest town in the United States, St. Augustine, by Sir Francis Drake, on his return from his expedition to the Spanish Drake -s^- Main. The Spanish Armada occupied the attention of Eng- saint f land too intensely, when Drake returned, for any effort to be A made, either to follow up his victory in Florida, or to renew the English establishment at Roanoke. The Spaniards who had fled from his arms in Florida, returned to the ruins of their fort and reestablished it. The Menendez, who has earned the right to be i Vol. i. ( p. 208. 9, Vol. i., p. 222. 556 SPANISH COLONIZATION. [CHAP. XXIII. called "great" by his cruelty and falsehood, had died. But the government of St. Augustine was made hereditary in his family l until the year 1655. The history of the colony, meanwhile, is scarcely more than that of an insignificant garrison, elevated occasionally to general interest in the events of a general war. 2 In 1593 twelve brothers of the order of St. Francis were sent to Florida, to continue such missions as had been established among the natives. By their efforts and those of other brethren sent to continue and enlarge their work, many missions were Missions in Florida. General View of St. Augustine. established in the course of the next hundred years. Of these, the most important was at first at the island of Guale. But the chief of the savages in this neighborhood excited his people against them, in a severe attack which resulted in the murder of five priests, and the cruel injury of another. The Governor avenged them by burning the granaries and dwellings of the Indians. In the years 1612 and 1613, thirty-one missionaries of the same brotherhood were sent to Florida, and the name of St. Helena was given to it as a religious province of that order. 3 Twenty missions were now established, and the brethren 1 In Buckingham Smith's collection of Florida papers is the will of one of the smaller Menendez governors. 2 It has been admirably treated, in its detail, by Mr. Fairbanks in his history. The South Carolina Historical Collections give original authorities on the " wars " with Carolina. 3 This name must not he confounded with the name of St. Helena on the shore of South Carolina, though both had the same origin. 1678.] THE SPANIARDS AND THE ENGLISH. 557 preached to the natives with success in their own language. In 1638, u war broke out between the colony and the Apalachee Indians. Such Indians as were captured were reduced to slavery ; the tribe was so far overcome as to be kept for the time of the coi- within its own limits. Meanwhile the growth of the colony was so small, that in 1647, eighty-two years after Menendez founded the colony, the number of families in St. Augustine was but three hundred, and this was almost the whole of the settlement. There were also fifty Franciscan friars domiciled in the city. When it is remembered that Menendez took with him two thousand six hun dred and fifty colonists from Cadiz, it will be seen that the his tory of Florida, thus far, had been a history of decline and not of progress. With the colonists of Virginia and other northern colonies the Spaniards had little intercourse, peaceful or otherwise. So soon as Charles II. gave a charter for the settlement of English ai Carolina, which was in 1663, jealousies arose on both sides, and the hatred of Englishmen for Spaniard, and Catholic for heretic, was enough to keep the little colonies suspicious of each other, even when nominal peace united their sovereigns at home. In 1665 an expedition under Captain John Davis, a buccaneer, made a descent on St. Augustine and ravaged the town. In 1667, however, Charles II. of England concluded a treaty with Spain, 1 in which Spain con ceded to England all colonies which Charles and his subjects " then possessed." On the other hand, Charles agreed to cut off all future protection from the buccaneers, who, till this time, .had considered Spanish property to be fair prize if found in the Pacific, and were not distressed if they seized it in the pther great ocean. No Eng lish settlement was in fact made in Carolina, under Charles's charter, until 1670. But, in the diplomacy of the two nations, it was virtually agreed that the English claim to that region was good, and the line of the St. Mary's River was eventually agreed on as the line of the separation between the English and Spanish dominions. It is there fore, to this day, the dividing line between the State of Georgia, which bears an English name, and that of Florida, which retains the Spanish name given it by Ponce de Leon. 2 The Spaniards, on their side, attacked the English colonies in 1670 and 1686, but without other success than burning and ravaging the homes of a few settlers on the coast. Such raids, of course, kept up the feeling of mutual hatred, strong enough at the very best. But 1 Each king was Charles II. Charles II. of England reigned from 1660 to 1685. Charles II. of Spain reigned from 1665 to 1700. 2 See vol. i., p. 147. 558 SPANISH COLONIZATION. [CHAP. XXIII. for the rest of the seventeenth century, there was no exploit on either side which deserves the name of war. Menendez had been authorized, at the very beginning of the col ony, to introduce five hundred negro slaves. So many laboring men pressed themselves upon him in Spain, that he made no use of the concession. But in 1687 one hundred negroes were introduced as slaves, and for nearly two centuries Florida suffered under the dis advantage of slave labor. Cabrera, who was governor in 1681, un dertook the enterprise of removing the Indians not Christianized to the islands of the coast. The result was simply an insurrection of these tribes, who took refuge within the limits of Carolina. In a sub sequent incursion, these Indians attacked the Tomoquas, a Christian The settle ment of I'ensaoola. tribe, friendly to the Spaniards, whose name is still preserved in the Tomoka River. They killed a large number of the Tomoquas, and carried the other prisoners to the colony of St. Helena, where their Christianity did not protect them so far but that they were reduced into slavery. Meanwhile, on the western coast of the peninsula of Florida, the Spanish government established a fort at Pensacola, in the year 1696. The name of the place, spelled by them Pen- cacola, is that of a tribe of Indians who once resided there. The Spaniards were stimulated by the efforts of the French to settle at the mouth of the Mississippi, and, indeed, had only just founded Pensacola when the French colony under D'Iberville arrived. A square fort, known by the name of Charles, the king of Spain, a church, and other public buildings, were erected. Andres d'Arriola was the first governor. Within two years D'Iberville touched at the new post, nor was it long before his brother was attacking it, in the War of the Succession. Before that time, however, new opportunities 1700.] WAR WITH CAROLINA. 559 for carnage and ravage had been found by English and Spaniards on the eastern shore. Near the close of the year 1700, on the death of Governor Blake of Carolina, James Moore had been chosen as his successor. With the poor object of personal gain from the traffic in Indian slaves, he granted commissions for the capture of Indians with power to sell them as slaves ; and, on the outbreak in Europe of the war with Spain, he undertook an expedition against St. Augustine with the same object in view. He embarked with this purpose in September, 1702, having arranged that Daniel, an officer of spirit, should make a descent upon the town by land, while Moore himself block- English ex . aded the harbor by sea. The Spaniards, under their gov- Sst^Augu^- ernor Cuniga, had heard of the movement, and retired with tme- their effects into their castle. When Moore arrived, he found his guns too weak to assault them, and sent Daniel to Jamaica for heavy artillery. While Daniel was absent, two Spanish ships, one of twenty-two guns and one of eighteen, appeared off the harbor, and so terrified the English that they raised the siege. Moore retired by land to Charleston, without losing a man, burning the town of St. Augustine and his own transports. Daniel, on his return with the mortars and guns for which he had been sent, hardly' escaped capture. The Spaniards retaliated for this foolish assault in exciting the Apalachee Indians, their allies, to attack the English set- SpanishRe . tlements. The Apalachees marched, nine hundred in num- taliation - ber, but fell into an ambush of the Creeks, who were always the firm allies of the English, and were routed by them. In reward for this service, all who survived of the Indians who had been held as slaves in St. Augustine and those who had been taken since 1640, were now set free by Cuniga, under a promise that they should return to work on the fortifications whenever they were needed. Cuniga urged the government at home to send him the means to make five new posts on his frontiers. Before any such aid reached him, Moore, with a thousand Creeks and about fifty of the Carolina militia, at tacked the Indian allies of the Spaniards and defeated them. He carried away three hundred slaves, most of the people of seven Indian towns. 1 He burned San Luis and Ayaralla, and took the church plate and vestments, and everything else of value. These Indians had, before this time, made some progress in civilization it was, perhaps, the loosening of the habits of savage life which made them so easy a prey to the untamed savages who attacked them. This incursion was followed by others, frequent enough to forbid the 1 South Carolina Report in Carroll's Collections, ii. 353. 560 SPANISH COLONIZATION. [CHAP. XXIII. recolonization of the wasted country before the end of the war. So enraged were the Indians that the Carolinians were obliged to put up forts for their frontier defence, one of which was established at Apalachicola, close to the limits of the State of Florida. 1 The Ye- massees, who had been driven out from Carolina into Florida, kept up an unremitted warfare on the frontiers. So soon as Bienville, Governor of Louisiana, learned in 1719, that war existed between Spain and France, he took Pensacola bv Capture and . .*- . recapture of surprise. Ihe Spaniards retook it at once, in the same way. But, in September of the same year, Bienville took it again. This time the French commander destroyed the fortifica tions and the town, leaving only a small battery and a handful of men. In 1722, the Spaniards reoccupied the harbor, and built a town on Santa Rosa island, near where Fort Pickens now stands. But the settlement was gradually transferred to the northern side of the bay, where the present city of Pensacola stands ; the point taken on the island having proved particularly sandy and barren. In 1732, Oglethorpe's settlement of Georgia pressed even closer than Carolina had done on the frontiers of Florida. Oglethorpe Hostilities claimed that the Altamaha was the southern boundary of his ^^ and province. The English fort, King George, erected on the Florida. banks of that river, had already given umbrage to the Span iards, and in 1736, the Spanish government ordered Oglethorpe to evacuate all territory south of St. Helena Sound. The Governor brought three companies of foot with him to Frederics, the most northerly Spanish settlement, the place still known by the same name on the sea-coast of Georgia. Oglethorpe went at once to Eng land for aid. At that moment the people of England were indig nant with Spain for other reasons, and Oglethorpe returned, with the commission of major-general, and a regiment of men. The Span iards strengthened St. Augustine in their turn. In October, Wai- pole's pacific policy was abandoned, war was declared, and the Eng lish sent a squadron under Admiral Vernon to the West Indies, with directions to aid Oglethorpe, who at once set on foot operations against St. Augustine. He succeeded in cementing the alliance be tween the English and the Creeks, who hated the Spaniards with a very perfect hatred. The officers of the navy having agreed to cooperate in the attack on St. Augustine, Oglethorpe appointed a rendezvous on the Florida side of the St. John's River and moved on the 9th of May, 1740, with 1 This is not at the site of the present town of Apalachicola. The point was farther up the river of that name, not far from Chattahoochee. The fort known as Savanas was still farther up, and must not be confounded with the site of Savannah. 1 740.] WAR WITH GEORGIA. 561 four hundred whites and a large party of Indians. The next day he in vested a Spanish outpost called Diego, belonging to a Spaniard, named Spinosa, reduced and garrisoned it. He then returned to his rendez vous, and with his whole command two thousand men, regular troops, provincials, and Indians, moved against Fort Moosa, two miles from St. Augustine. The Spaniards abandoned this post and retired into the town, which he had given them time to provision by driving in cattle, while he was occupied with Fort Diego and his counter-marches. He was compelled to blockade the harbor and invest the town. He left Oglethorpe's Attack on St Augustine (from " An Impartial Account of the Late Expedition to St. Augus tine." London, 1742). l ninety-five Highlanders and forty-two Indians at Moosa, to intercept all supplies of cattle for the town. This was all the force he left on the land side. He sent Colonel Vanderdussen, with the Carolina regiment, to take Point Quartelle on the water side, about a mile distant from the castle, and build a battery. With his own regiment and most of the Indians he landed on the island of Anastasia. One of the ships was stationed to the southward to block up the Matanzas passage, and the others blockaded the harbor. Batteries were erected on Anastasia. Having made these dispositions, Oglethorpe summoned the Spanish i KEY TO THE MAP. 1. The Town. 2. The Castle. 3. ABattery. 4. Moosa or Negro Fort. 5. The Look out. 6. Small Fort abandoned by the Spaniards. 7. A Battery of one mortar, and three six-pounders. 8. A Battery, one mortar, two eighteen-pounders, and one nine-pounder. 9 Six half galleys at anchor (Span ish). 10. A Battery, two mortars, four eighteen-pounders, and one nine-pounder. 11. Harbor " where our vessels lay." 12. Carolina Regiments, first Camp on Pt. Quartelle. 13. Sailor's Camp. 14. Carolina Regiments, Second Camp on Pt. Quartelle. 15. Carolina Camp upon Acastasia. 16. The Volunteers' Camp. 17 Gen Oglethorpe's Camp after he went from Anastasia. vol.. ii 36 562 SPANISH COLONIZATION. [HAP. XXIII. garrison ; to receive from the Governor the cheerful answer that he should be glad to kiss his hands in the fort. Oglethorpe then began his attack by throwing shells into the town, which were returned by the fort and six half galleys in the harbor. Little execution was done on either side. Captain Warren of the English navy offered to lead a night attack against the Spanish galleys, but a council of war de clared this impracticable. On the other hand, the Spanish com mander sent out a detachment against Colonel Palmer in his isolated post at Moosa, and broke it up, killed him and sixty-eight of his men, and took many prisoners. A party of Chickasaws coming to the English camp, cut off a Spaniard's head and brought it to Ogle thorpe. He showed his indignation, called them barbarous dogs and bade them begone. The proud " unconquered Chickasaws " were offended, and said the French would not treat them thus, had they carried in an English head, which was probably true. These allies, thus rebuffed, deserted the English camp. The vessel at the Matan- zas passage was not a sufficient guard on the south. For, by the Mosquito inlet, which runs parallel to the sea, supplies from Cuba were received by the garrison. The master of the vessel at Ma- tanzas Inlet could see them pass, beyond his range of prevention. Some Spanish prisoners, who were carried to Oglethorpe, told him that the reinforcements were seven hundred men, with a large supply of provisions. All prospect was thus lost of starving the garrison. Retreat of The naval commander of the English feared hurricanes, and the English, g^j jj e mu8 ^ withdraw. The Carolinian troops withdrew without asking leave. And poor General Oglethorpe himself, sick of a fever, was obliged to withdraw his own regiment, and reached Fred- erica early in July. So disgraceful a defeat of a force so considerable greatly elated the Spaniards. When their supplies arrived from the Havana, they had but three days' bread, and they piously ascribed their relief to St. Rosana, the Virgin of the Apalachees. The Carolinians, who had expended men and money freely in the expedition, were indignant, and charged Oglethorpe with utter incompetency, nor were the officers of the English army- and navy of another opinion. Monteano, the Spanish Governor, who had defended his post so well, expected a renewal of the attack in the autumn, which would have been a much more favorable season for his enemies. He begged for reinforcements, and received eight companies of infantry. But no second attack came. He was tempted to retaliate. A terrible fire had devastated Charleston, and he urged the Governor at Cuba to make an attack on the place at the moment of its exhaustion. His advice was not taken in 1741, but in the next year a fleet of thirty- 1762.] FLORIDA CEDED TO ENGLAND. 563 six sail with two thousand men was sent to him. He added a force of one thousand men, took the command, and sailed for the harbor of St. Simon's, better known now, perhaps, as the harbor of Brunswick. This movement, however, was, in its turn, unsuccessful, and Monteano returned as much mortified as Oglethorpe the year before. In March of the next year, Oglethorpe took the aggressive, and marched to the very walls of St. Augustine, with such celer- Continued ity, that his Indian allies killed forty Spanish soldiers before hostillties - they could enter the fort. But, failing to draw out the Spaniards for an encounter in the' field he again retired, and in 1748, peace at home closed these miserable hostilities on the frontier. The garrison Old Gate at St. Augustine. at St. Augustine was so reduced that in 1759 the whole force was but five hundred men. When in 1762 hostilities broke out again be tween England and Spain, an English fleet seized the Havana, and, on the negotiation of peace, Spain was glad to cede Florida to regain Cuba. This measure indeed was necessary to the tripartite T i i r\ -i -i r-i Cession of diplomacy between England, Spain, and France, in which Florida to eastern Louisiana was ceded to England. For, where east ern Louisiana began and where Florida ended, had never been de termined. Spain gained by that treaty all western Louisiana, and could well afford to give up Florida to the victorious English, who thus carried to the Gulf the frontier of that colonial empire which was to be theirs for so few years. The English government named 564 SPANISH COLONIZATION. [CHAP. XXIII. General Grant Governor of East Florida, and he received the post from the Spaniards. At the period of the evacuation the whole population amounted to 5,700 persons, including a garrison of 2,000 men. Many condition of ^ effc tue P lace never to return. Three years afterward, a Ifncufter' traveller speaks of Picolata, a small fort and garrison on the cession. the gt> j ohn5 Mr R o i] e ' s settlement, twenty-five miles above, and Mr. Spalding's trading house, fifteen miles farther up, as the only stations on this magnificent river. 1 The greater part of the popu lation of Florida consisted of a mixture of the remnants of the Cowetas, Talipoosas, Coosas, Apalachees, Cussetas, Ockmulgees, Wee- tumkas, Pakanas, Taensas, Chaesihoomas, Abekas, and other tribes, who had organized in a confederacy under the name, since well known and formidable, of Muscogees. From this confederacy the Seminoles afterwards parted ; their name Isty-Semole, wild men, indicates that they were hunters, rather than farmers. In 1773, Bartram speaks of the Seminoles as but a weak people in respect of numbers ; he sup poses all of them would not people one of the Muscogee towns. As civilization advanced, and the Indian towns were broken up, the "wild men" must have gained accessions from their former kindred. Bartram " ventures to assert that no part of the globe so abounds with wild game or creatures fit for the food of man " as the territory which they then inhabited. The population of this Muscogee confede racy, sixty years after, was twenty-six thousand. 2 The population of Indians and whites in 1762 was probably larger than that of whites and negroes in 1830, when there were only about fifteen thousand of each of those races, reported in the census of the United States. While the kings of Spain followed up thus languidly the expedi tions of Ponce de Leon and of Hernando de Soto, in Florida and the other eastern regions traversed by those adventurers, their viceroys and other officers in Mexico showed more eagerness both in discovery and in colonization to the northward, and their enterprises, both by sea and by land, come within the range of the historian of the United States. Hernando Cortez himself, as early as 1534, sent out an expedition of discovery under Hernando de Grijalva on the Pacific coast, Lowe/cail- in which that commander first discovered the peninsula of California. Not long before, a Spanish author, 3 who had with very inferior genius attempted to write a sequel to Lobeira's in imitable romance of Amadis of Gaul, had invented a pagan queen of 1 Bartram found only the same settlements in 1773, three more trading-posts were to be established in that year. His map shows the sites of " Rollestown " and Spalding's post. 2 Roman's Florida. Gallatin's Synopsis, p. 101. 8 Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo. 1534.] "CALIFORNIA." 56o Amazons, who brought from the "Right hand of the Indies" her allies to the assistance of the infidels in their attacks on Constanti nople. In this romance which bore the name of " Esplandian," the Emperor Esplandian, the imaginary son of the imaginary Amadis, appears as the Greek emperor, living in Constantino ple. The imaginary Amazo nian queen is Calafia, and to her imagined kingdom, blazing with gold and diamonds and pearls, the author had given the name " California," a name per haps derived from the word Calif, which in the mind of the children of crusaders was con nected with paynim lands. This romance, which would now be forgotten but for this name California, and from a single reference to it in Don Quixote, was a comparatively new novel in the days of Cortez, the first edition having been issued from the press only in the year 1510, and the sec ond in 1519. Both Grijalva and Cortez were still deluded by the universal impression of their time that they were on name n aii- e the coast of Asia or in its neighborhood ; and, having discov ered this region near the latitude of Constantinople "on the right hand of the Indies," they were not unwilling to engage the interest of the romance-reading world by giving to their discovery the name of the gold and diamond bearing region of Amazons. This unknown country, which by this accident gave the name to the country which proved to be the richest gold-bearing region in the world, was thus described by the exuberant fancy of the romancer, twenty-five years before Grijalva discovered the peninsula of Califor nia, and at least thirty years before the discovery of that part of the mainland which has yielded to the world its untold millions of gold. " Know that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California, very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise, 1 and it was peopled by black women without any man among them, 1 In the cosmogony of that time it was supposed, as it had been supposed in Dante's time, that the Terrestrial Paradise was opposite to Jerusalem. Compare Mr. Hole's paper, Am. Ant. Soc. Transactions, April, 1872. Portrait of Cortez. 566 SPANISH COLONIZATION. [CHAP. XXIII. for they lived in the fashion of Amazons. They were of strong and hardy bodies, of ardent courage, and great force. Their island was the strongest in all the world, with its steep cliffs and rocky shores. Their arms were all of gold, and so was the harness of the wild beasts which they tamed and rode. For in the whole island l there was no metal but gold. They lived in caves wrought out of the rock with much labor. They had many ships with which they sailed out to other countries to obtain booty." In another part of the romance it is said coolly that precious stones are to be found in California like stones of the field for their abundance. The imperious and impetuous Cortez was dissatisfied with the slow Expedition progress of Grijalva, and embarked himself, in hope of more of cortez. succe ss, with four hundred Spaniards and three hundred slaves in 1535. He had, before this, sent a small expedition north by land, of whose fate he never heard a word. He now coasted both sides of the Gulf of California, then called the Gulf of Cortez, but known for nearly two centuries afterwards as the Red Sea. 2 During his stay in the bay of Santa Cruz he learned the distressing news of the arrival of the Viceroy Mendoza. The appointment of this officer by the Emperor Charles left to the great conqueror no civil adminis tration, and restricted him to his duties as military commander. So eager was he, however, for the further prosecution of discovery at the north, that he sent Francisco de Ulloa to continue it, and in the course of two years Ulloa traced the coasts of California nearly to the mouth of the Colorado River of the West. The very first exploration of the Gulf of California resulted in the discovery of pearls, and from that day to this the pearl fishery has been prosecuted there. In the excited notions of that day, it was taken for granted that a country which produced pearls would pro duce gold and diamonds ; and it can hardly be doubted that a re flected glory from the romance of " Esplandian," and the gorgeous description there of the imagined California, hung over the unex plored parts of the namesake of that province. Spaniards are pro verbially ready for building castles in the air ; and, although the voyages of Grijalva, of Cortez, and of Ulloa, brought back no diamonds, and no gold, yet they brought pearls enough to awaken popular interest and curiosity. As it happened, also, these reports gave birth to another romance hardly second in absurdity to the fables of Esplan dian. Mendoza, the viceroy, was disgusted when he found that his rival Cortez still insisted on his right to send out explorers. When 1 It is possible that this reference to the island gives the reason why, in face of all ex plorations, the geographers so long marked the peninsula of California as an island. 2 So called by Marquette in his Narrative. 1540.] FATHER NigA AND CORONADO. 587 Cortez sent out Ulloa, Mendoza borrowed money with which to send out Vasquez de Coronado in the same direction. Coronado sent in advance a Franciscan friar named Marco de Niga, who had with him a negro, one of the four men who had crossed the of Marco de continent from the perilous expedition under Narvaez. 1 This Father Marco showed a facility in narrative, which belongs only to the master of that " lie with a circumstance " which is said to be the most deceptive lie of all. Returning to Coronado he announced the discovery of seven cities, whose number alone suggested the famous " seven cities " of the island of the old legend. 2 To the capital of these Seven Cities the name Cibola, or Cevola, was given. He gave a description of the city of Cibola, as he finally arrived there after thirty days of travel from St. Michael in Culiacan. 3 According to his story, Stephen Dorantes the negro, who had served as in some sort a guide, and whom he had sent before him had been killed by the jealous inhabitants of this city. Nic,a himself, however, determined to see it with his own eyes ; and thus came near enough for the mountain prospect which he describes. He then fled back with his story to St. Michael in Culiacan, " with more fear than victuals," as he says. In sharp contrast with his tales of gold and silver and turquoises and diamonds, is the business-like report of Vasquez de Expedition Coronado, who with a little army followed up the father's of d coro- rt traces. On the 22d of April, 1540, they left St. Michael, nado - and on the 23d of June, had arrived, by travelling in a northern and northeasterly direction, on the confines of a desert country of which Ni^a had warned them. Through the desert " is a most wicked way, at least thirty leagues and more because they are inac cessible mountains." After the thirty leagues, however, they found pleasant country, with rivers and grass, and, in a day more, they met Indians who at first seemed friendly. But a day or two more showed that the natives meant to defend their passes, but brought Coronado to a town, which he called Grenada, and which, however unlike the Cibola of Father Marco's description, he was willing to accept for it. " To be brief," he writes, " I can assure your honour that the friar saith truth in nothing that he reported, but all was quite the con trary." Still the names of the cities proved to be correct, and al though the houses were not wrought with turquoises nor lime nor brick, they proved to be " very excellent good houses " of three or four lofts high, with good lodgings and fair chambers and ladders * See vol. i., p. 156. 2 See vol. i., pp. 13, 35. Compare note xxiv. in Appendix to vol. iii., Irving's Columbus. 8 See vol. i., p. 192. 568 SPANISH COLONIZATION. [CHAP. XXIII. instead of stairs. The seven cities were within four leagues of each other and all together made the kingdom of Cibola. Of turquoises, Coronado found none, though he thought some had been carried away in fear of his arrival ; of emeralds he found two, which were lost on his way home ; and of gold none. This was the sorry result of the monk's story and of the expedition founded upon it. The natives wore cotton dresses, though Coronado thought the country too cold for cotton. 1 He said they ate the best cakes that he A Pueblo restored (from Cozzens). ever saw, and had the best way of grinding. One woman of Cibola would grind four times as much meal as four Mexican women. They brought their salt from a lake only one day's journey from their city. But they had no knowledge of the Northern Sea, nor of the Western Sea, at which ignorance Coronado did not wonder, for he believed himself one hundred and fifty leagues from the Western Ocean. He describes what we must suppose to be buffaloes, as " sheep as big as a horse, with very great horns and little tails, with their horns so big that it is a wonder to behold their greatness." Here ends Coronado's own narrative, which deserves respect and credence. He would not return without doing something nor with empty hands, and as he was told that the country was better and better he went on. Cardenas with a company of cavalry continued 1 It afterwards proved that these dresses were made from the thread of the maguey. 1543.] CABRILLO. 569 westward till he came to the sea. Coronado went to Tiguex and there had news of the long-sought Quivira. After sieges and battles and other adventures, he found a region which he accepted as worthy of that name. But in place of the hoary-headed King Tatatrax whom he was to find here, who was girt with a Bracamart and worshipped a cross of gold with the image of the Queen Fate of Cor . of Heaven, Coronado found a naked savage, with a jewel of onado - copper hanging from his neck, " which was all his riches." After two years of such misadventures, Coronado fell from his horse and went mad. The rest of his party, excepting one or two stragglers, returned to Mexico. 1 They represented Quivira as in the latitude of forty, with grass, plums, mulberries, nuts, melons, and grapes, but without cotton. The people dressed in ox-hides and deer-skins. They reported, Gomara says, that they had seen ships on the coast, with golden albatrosses or pelicans on their .prows, the seamen of which made signs that their voyage had been thirty days. The narrative of Gomara is entitled to little historical regard, that of Father Niga to none. But the manly letter of Coronado commands respect, and his narrative was unexpectedly confirmed nearly half a century after, by a new discovery which enables us to fix with some precision the site of Cibola and the "seven cities." Coron ado's re port displeased Mendoza, who had spent large sums in the expedition. But Coronado insisted that the country was poor and too far from suc cor, and therefore no establishment was made there. An after" narra tive gives a more particular description of the buffalo, and alludes to the custom of the natives of burning the buffaloes' dung. These no tices are alone sufficient, in a degree, to locate Quivira. But his tale of dogs, trained as beasts of burden, has not yet been confirmed by other writers. With the introduction of the horse, the Indians may have abandoned such use of those animals. Meanwhile, upon the coast, after various failures, a voyage was made in 154^, which resulted in the discovery of the sea-coast of that part of California, voyage of which is now so important a State. Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo Cabrill - sailed with two ships from the port de Navidad, on the 27th of June. /TfV in that year. Touching near the point of the peninsula, he coasted it on its oceaiL^ side as far as the latitude of 44. Here he found extreme^oIcTin March of t&fSSR, and returned. He gave names to different points, which have not been retained, with the exception of Cape Mendocino, which he named in honor of the Viceroy Mendoza, who had sent him. He described it as a large cape between mountains covered with / I f* v/>h j 1 Gomara, cited in Hakluyt, iii. p. 454. 570 \ SPANISH COLONIZATION. [CHAP. XXIII. jmow. This cape subsequently became the point best known upon that coast, because the Spanish fleets took their departure from it on their way to the East Indies, and it was made the object of the fleets eastward bound. Cabrillo placed it about the latitude of 40 north ; it lies, in fact, a few minutes northward of that parallel. Like all other Spanish voyagers of that time, Cabrillo missed the remark able Bay of San Francisco, the entrance to which is not easily discerned. Near its parallel he described some hills covered with trees, which he called the Point of San Martin. In the next year Juan Rodriguez repeated this voyage, by sail ing as far as^Cape / Mendocino ; but it was reserved for Sir Francis Drake, the great English seaman, to discover a seaport in California. He spent some weeks on shore, and took possession in the name of Queen Elizabeth. He was engaged in his celebrated voyage round the world. With his little fleet, consisting of the Pelican of one hun dred tons, the Elizabeth and the Marigold each of eighty, Drake had passed the Straits of Ma gellan, and entered the Pacific Ocean on the 6th of Septem ber, 1578. On the 30th, he lost sight of the Marigold in a gale, and never saw her again. On the 8th of October, the Eliza beth deserted him ; and he was left to pursue his voyage of ad venture and discovery in the Pelican alone. He was for the rest of that year and the begin ning of 1579 the terror of the Spanish ports in the South Seas. Having left the port of Gua- tulco on the Mexican coast, on the 16th of April, he went di rectly to sea, and having first sailed west and afterwards north, he ran as far north as the parallel of 43, or, according to other accounts, of 48 north latitude, where they were ail dismayed by exceeding cold. Six men could hardly do the work of three, sojitiff was the rigging from ice, and this as late in the year as the month of June. On the 5th, tfeey made land, and anchored in a bay much exposed to winds and flaws, and, " when they ceased, there instantly followed thick stinking fogs, which nothing but the wind could remove." If this land, the first seen by Drake on the Sir Francis Drake. 1579.] DRAKE IN CALIFORNIA. 571 as one coast north of Mexico, were indeed under the parallel of 42 C account implies, it is the shore of Pelican Bay, which has Drake in been rightly named from his ship, at the line which divides Callforma - Oregon from California. But, although the accounts are confused, Drake seems to have seen the coast as far north as 4ji 30' of north latitude, and indeed the claim was made that he saw it at 48 . 1 This latitude corresponds best of all with the accounts of the severe cold.* But Robert Dudley, a son of the Earl of Leicester, himself an explorer, and well acquainted with the survivors of these voyages, says : " The reason why Drake sought and found the port of New Albion, was that having passed beyond Cape Mendocino in latitude forty-two and a half, in seeking for water as far as forty-three and a half, he found the coast so cold in the month of June that his people could not bear it." 2 Dudley gives the same latitudes to Drake's discoveries on his map, and it seems probable that the parallel of 43 30' marks the northern limit of Drake's discovery. Discouraged of New AI- by the cold, Drake ran down the shore toward the south east, and on the 17th of June, " it pleased God to send us into a fair and good bay with good wind to enter the same." In this bay, which he called the Port of New Albion, he lay for more than a month, having landed his men, while he refitted his vessel, and built a little fort on shore. The next morn ing after their ar rival an Indian ap peared in a canoe making tokens of respect and submission. He brought with him a little basket of rushes filled with an herb called tabak, which he threw into Drake's boat. Drake tried to recompense him, but in vain, he took noth ing but a hat thrown into the water. Then and afterwards, the ship's company of the Peliean thought that these natives reverenced them as gods. Drake proceeded to land his stores, by way of preparation for repairing his ship. As he landed, a large company of the Indians 1 Humboldt evidently thought so. See Humboldt's New Spain, ii. 337, et sefj. 2 Early maps, and a note on Robert Dudley in The Proceedings of the Am. Antirj. Soc. Oct. 21, 1873. Drake's Port of New Albion. 61-2 SPANISH COLONIZATION. [CHAP. XXIII. approached, and, to the end of his sojourn, the most friendly relations were maintained between them and the Englishmen. Drake exerted himself, probably not without success, to remove the impression that he and his were gods. But he took the precaution of fortifying his camp with care against too eager advances. On the 26th of June, the news of the arrival of the strangers hav- An embassy ing been widelv dispersed, a greater number of people as- fromthein- sembled, among them the king himself, a man of goodly stature, with many other tall and warlike men, and a guard of a hundred strong. He sent two messengers in advance, to say that the Hioh, or king, was coming. One of the am bassadors spoke in a very low tone, and the other Drake and the Indian King. repeated the message verbatim, very loud, in a ceremony which lasted half an hour. They then asked for a present in token of friendship, which Drake gladly gave. On their return to the king he and his train appeared in pomp. In front of him marched a tall man with the sceptre or mace of black wood, a yard and a half long. Upon it hung two crowns, one larger than the other, with three long chains of bone. Such chains were regarded as marks of honor, the links in each were almost innumerable. The king was clothed in a dress of rabbit skins, this being a distinction which the others might not claim. The guard were dressed in other skins. The great body of the people 1579.] DRAKE'S RECEPTION BY THE INDIANS. 573 were almost naked. Those about the king's person wore feathers as a sign of honor, and had " cawls of feathers " covered with a down growing on an herb, exceeding any other down for fineness, and TmTy to be used bythose around the king. The common people were almost naked, but their hair, also, was tied with feathers, arranged in a different way. 1 Drake received them cordially but with precaution. The sceptre- bearer and another officer then spoke for half an hour, one re peating very loudly what the other said in low tones. This ceremony was fol lowed by a dance, in which the women joined. After this they asked Drake to sit down, and the king and others were then understood by the Englishmen to ask him " to become "' wv "~ <*** ' ^ " " '."-'- the kinff and JTOVer- California Indians and their Summer Huts (From Bartlett ) nor of their country," to whom they were most willing to resign the government of themselves and their posterity : and more fully to declare their meaning, the king, singing with all the rest, set the crown upon Drake's head, and enriched his neck with all their chains. They saluted him by the title of Hioh, and in a song and dance con gratulated themselves that now he was their king and patron they were the happiest people in the world. Drake having half a continent offered him in this manner, thought best to accept it, not for himself, but for his queen. " In the name and for the use of Queen Elizabeth, he took the king by the Sceptre, Crown and Dignity of that Land upon him, wishing that the riches and Treasures thereof, wherein the upper parts abound, might be as easily transported to England as he had obtained the sovereignty thereof." When the ceremony was finished, the common 1 La Pcrouse and Langsdorff observed their fondness for feathers, as late as the end of the eighteenth century. " The feathers are twisted together into a sort of ropes, and then these are tied close together, so as to have a feathery surface on both sides." Langsdorff counted in one feather bandeau four hundred and fifty tail-feathers of the golden-winged woodpecker. Each woodpecker furnishes but two feathers. See Forbes's California, p. 183. SPANISH COLONIZATION. [CHAP. XXIII. Expedition into the interior. people eagerly offered sacrifices to the strangers with shrieks and weeping, tearing the flesh from their faces with their nails. The English vainly attempted to dissuade them, by lifting their hands and eyes to heaven. During their stay the people generally brought sac rifices every third day, till they at last understood how much the English were displeased by them. As soon as the English had finished the repairs upon their ship, Drake and some of his company made a journey into the in terior. He found the Indians living in villages. The houses were made by digging round holes in the earth, covered by poles of wood, which met in the centre " like a spired steeple," the whole being covered with earth. The door " made slopous like the scuttle of a ship " was also the chim ney. 1 The people slept in these houses on rushes on the ground, around a fire in the middle. The country was very dif ferent from the bar ren sea- shore. It was fruitful, and fur nished with all nec essaries. The ad venturers saw thou- ^^^ sands of deer in a herd, and were much interested by the ground squirrel, which they describe as a peculiar " coney." The 5 whole country was a warren Wl of them. Their bodies were as big as the Barbary coneys, their heads as the heads of the English, the feet like the feet of a want, and the tail long like that of a rat. The coney had on each side of the chin a bag into which to gather such food as he did not need to eat. Returning to his port, Drake took possession of the country in the 1 Captain Beechey found similar houses as late as 1827. Drake's Departure. 1579.] LOCALITY OF DRAKE'S DISCOVERIES. 575 name of Queen Elizabeth. He erected a monument which was, like so many other monuments of possession, only a wooden post with a copper plate upon it. On this he inscribed an assertion of the right of Queen Elizabeth and her successors to that kingdom, with the time of his own arrival, and a statement of the free resignation of the country by the king and people into her hands. Her picture and arms, and Drake's arms, were also engraved on this remarkable plate, f which must have done credit to the amateur engraver from the crew of the Pelican. . After this ceremony of possession, the ship sailed for the Moluc cas, to the great grief of the native king and his followers, ^^^ de _ who lighted fires on the cliffs as if to cheer them on their P arture - way. It is a curious question, not yet decided by geographers, what was the bay where Sir Francis Drake repaired his ship, and on the shore of which he encamped and took possession. The va- Dke-s y ,- ' rious accounts differ about the highest north latitude attained ay ' by Drake, but when driven back by cold weather he came south, they agree " it was within thirty-eight degrees toward the line." " In which height it pleased God to send us into a fair and good bay with good wind to enter the same." Was this bay the Bay of San Fran cisco, of which the opening, by the Golden Gate, is in 37 49' N. latitude, or is it the open bay just above this, marked on the maps as Sir Francis Drake's Bay, or is it Bodega Bay, where the latitude of the anchorage is 38 19' ? J Within so narrow a range it would be idle to infer anything from Drake's general statement that the good bay which God led him into was in 38. Either of them is near enough to meet that definition. The maps annexed will enable the reader to understand this diffi culty. The more modern one represents the coast substantially as it has been drawn by the accurate hydrographers of our own time. The other was drawn early in the seventeenth century by Robert Dudley, son of the great Earl of Leicester, himself a navigator and the son-in- law of Cavendish, one of the explorers of the South Seas. Drake's port of New Albion will be found on this, so drawn as to represent sufficiently well the double bay of San Francisco. If this were the only authority it would probably be granted that Drake's port was San Francisco Bay. But it is quite certain that the Spaniards, who eagerly tried to rediscover the port, with this map in their possession, did not succeed until near two hundred years after. Long before they did discover it, they were seeking for it, calling it the Bay of San Francisco that name probably having been taken from no less a 1 These latitudes are those of Captain Beechey's survey. 576 SPANISH COLONIZATION. [CHAP. XXIII. saint than the heretic, Sir Francis Drake. In 1769, a land party dis covered the great bay which runs south from the entrance, now called the Golden Gate. But it was not until 1776 that this inland sea was connected by the Spaniards with the ocean. It is urged on the one side, that Sir Francis Drake would never have called " Jack's Bay," which is the Sir Fran cis Drake's bay of the maps, " a fair and good bay," nor thanked God as for a special providence for the wind which took him into that open road stead, which under the circumstances, he could hardly have kept out of. If indeed, he did land, and unload his ship there, repair her, and take in his cargo again, lying for five weeks there, he is the last shipmaster who has done so. Having done so, that he should have drawn the bottle-shaped bay, which appears on the charts of his time, seems impossible. For such reasons, high authority 1 concedes that he entered the Golden Gate and the Bay of San Francisco, now known by that name. On the other hand, it is urged that the physical distinctions of the Golden Gate and the present San Francisco Bay are so marked that Drake or his historian must have said more of them : that " fair and good bay," is not language as strong as should be used of that matchless harbor, and that once discovered, it could never be forgotten. The weight of California!! opinion at this time seems to be that Sir Francis Drake never entered the Golden Gate. In one of the early narra tives of his voyage, in Hondius's voyages, the annexed map of the bay, unfortunately with no scale, is given in the margin. It bears this inscription in very bad Latin : " The inhabitants by terrible frequent laceration of their bodies deprecate the departure of Drake, now twice crowned, from this harbour of Albion." But it is clear enough, from an examination of the copy of a small part of the Bay of San Francisco, from Captain Beechey's survey, that the draughts man of Hondius's 2 map, had no knowledge of that great estuary. 1 So Davidson in the Coast Pilot, and Mr. Greenhow. 8 For the copy of Hondius's very rare map, we are indebted to Mr. Charles Deane. Map of a Part of the California Coast. Opinions of geographers. 1579.] LOCALITY OF DRAKE'S DISCOVERIES. 577 It is equally sure, however, that his map represents no other bay on the coast, and that it must, therefore, be taken as merely imaginary. Dudley also says that Drake found many wild horses at the northward, at which he wondered, because the Spaniards had never found horses in America. It is customary to account for the immense herds of American horses on the assumption that the Spaniards introduced them. Drake's visit, how- t j WU (.vi f f VfUtM . Ul ? i coZ" -M " ^fe^ signs of Moorish archi tecture may be still noticed in the public buildings of El Paso, as in other mission buildings of Mexican or Spanish origin in that region ; and the venerable church itself is supposed by the worshippers to have been built in the earlier part of the seventeenth century. From this time, with various reverses, the valley of the Rio Grande inscription was ne M by Spanish priests and officials, with some set tlers. Inscription Rock, a remarkable rock on the west side of the Sierra Madre, not far from the pueblo of Acoma, records, not insufficiently, the history of this outlying province, in the auto graphs, or autoglyphs, of the men who belonged to the time. For two hundred and ten feet of its height this rock has a natiu*al pol ish. At a distance it perfectly resembles a Moorish castle, so that the Spaniards called it " El Moro." Indians and Spaniards have used it as a monument rock ; and when Lieut. Simpson saw it in 1 The dates given by Pike, Allegre, and Venegas are confused, but those in the text are furnished for Lieutenant Simpson by Don Donaciano Vigil, Secretary ^f State for New Mexico, and may probably be relied upon. Inscription Rock. 1603.] THE SEARCH FOR "PUERTO FRANCISCO." 585 1849, he found a large number of inscriptions still visible. Some were mere savage carvings of hands or animals, but many were in Spanish or a sort of Latin. 1 On the western coast, the news of Drake's discovery stimulated the court of Spain to make some new efforts to save the land, Action of whose natives had given it to the heretic queen. Under the ^gaSuo king's own orders Viscaino, an officer of ability, was again vucl'i'*' despatched on the survey of the coasts of California. After vo > a s e one voyage on the gulf, which resulted in disaster, he sailed from Acapulco for a second on the 5th of May, 1602, and went as far as the parallel of 42 north. He rediscovered the harbors of San Diego and Monterey, and gave to them those names. He reported that the natives on the coast were docile, clothed with the skins of sea-wolves, but with abundance of hemp, flax, and cotton. The Indians all told him, he said, that in the inland were large towns, silver, and gold. Viscaino's manuscripts have not been brought to light. His second voyage was not finished until 1603. It appears that his instructions were to put into " Puerto Francisco," and see if anything was to be found of the ship San Augustin, which in 1595, had been sent from the Philippine Islands to survey that coast, and had been lost there. 1 With praiseworthy accuracy Lieutenant Simpson copied these curious records, and in his Report fac-similes of them were published. There are thirty-eight inscriptions in his list, ranging from the 16th day of April, 1606, when some officer " passed this place with despatches," down to 1836. It seems to have become a custom with the Spanish officers to leave here a brief account of their mission. As the other records of New Mexico before 1680 were burned by the Indians in that year, the earlier of these inscriptions supply names and dates not elsewhere accessible. The character of them may be understood from such examples as these : "Passed this place with despatches 16th day of April, 1606." " J. Apaulla, 1619." "Bartolome Narsso, Governor and Captain General of the provinces of New Mexico, for our Lord, the King, passed by this place on his return from the pueblo of Zuni, on the 29th of July, of the year 1620, and put them, in peace at their petition, asking the favor to become subjects of His Majesty ; and anew they gave obedience. All which they did with free consent, knowing it prudent, as well as very Christian. " To so distinguished and gallant a soldier, indomitable and famed, we love " (The rest of this inscription is illegible.) " Here passed General Don Diego de Bargas to conquer Santa Fe for the royal crown, New Mexico, at his own cost, in the year 1692." Judge Cozzens, in 1860, found and copied an earlier inscription: "Don Joseph de Ba- zemzalles. 1526." Judge Cozzens rightly says, that such an inscription could only be truly carved by one of the lost officers whom Cortez sent north in a quest for the lands of silver. Of that band of twenty men there is no history since they left Cortez, excepting on this silent stone. But, among Lieutenant Simpson's inscriptions, there appears, perfectly distinct, on another part of the rock, " For aqui pazo el Alferez D n Joseph de Payba Basconzelos el ano que tugo el Canildo del Reyno a su costa a 18 de feb de 1726 Anos." Tugo is some misspelling of the stone-cutter, but the meaning is that this officer, whose rank was that of lieutenant, passed here in an expedition undertaken at cost of the council of the kingdom. 586 SPANISH EXPLORATIONS AND COLONIZATION. [CHAP. XXIV. She was under the direction of Sebastian Rodriguez Cermenon. Her pilot, Volanos, was chief pilot of Viscaino's squadron. Having passed the latitude of Port Francisco, they returned to look for it, and anchored under La Punta de los Keys. This is the westerly point of "Jack's Bay." They did not land, and Viscaino having parted from his tender, continued his voyage in search of her. He thus lost his opportunity of discovering the great Bay of San Fran cisco. He ran up the coast, as far north as 42, and then, because his whole company were sick with a terrible distemper, they returned to Acapulco. The tender persevered as far as 43. Here her com- of Acapulco. mander found a river whose banks were covered with ash trees, wil lows, and other Spanish trees. But he had passed farther than his orders directed, and he returned to Acapulco also. No such river exists in that latitude. The Columbia is as far north as 48. Philip III., of Spain, or some minister of his, on the reception of ^ l ^ s report, issued a very interesting order, of the greatest stringency, that the search for a harbor should be renewed, and that Monterey should be occupied. But the fatality of inaction, which governed both Mexico and Spain, prevailed. Viscaino died as he was preparing for the expedition ordered, and the occupation of Northern California was reserved to another century. Men, widely differing from those who discovered California, acting under another class of motives, undertook the colonization which for a century and a half had been neglected, since it proved that she had no cities of gold and turquoises. The Spanish court, meanwhile, had changed as 1670.] MISSIONS IN CALIFORNIA AND ARIZONA. 587 much as the adventurers in Mexico had changed ; and the appeals to Charles the Second of Spain rested on different motives from those which had swayed the Emperor Charles, who from his distant throne lifted Cortez or put him down at his will. After one and another inefficient scheme for the conquest, as it was called, of California, a royal order came from Mexico to Spain that all enterprises in that direction should be laid aside. At this mo ment the Jesuit body, hardly yet declining from the maturity of its power, was urged by the persons in command in Mexico to take the charge of California. The Viceroy offered to the Jesuits the necessary sums, to be paid out of the king's treasury, if they would undertake the enterprise. The Mexican chapter of the society was convened for the considera tion of the proposal, and answered that while the society would un dertake the spiritual duty of fur nishing missionaries, they saw great inconveniences in undertak ing the temporal charge of such an enterprise, and declined. The gen eral council urged it again, but again the society refused. The last of these refusals was in 1686. Portrait of Philip Eusebio Francisco Kino, a brother of the Jesuit Society, who had come from Ingoldstadt in Bavaria, in pursuance of a vow made when seemingly at the point of death, undertook, almost sin- inCMto gle-handed, the regeneration of the peninsula of California. To his efforts, as it proved, the first settlement was due of those parts of California and Arizona which now belong to the United States. It is said that as early as 1658 he had been connected with the explora tions of Arizona. 1 He had afterwards been engaged in the examina tions of the peninsula of California made by order of the government. In 1686 he left the city of Mexico, as superior of the province of So- nora, the Mexican province immediately south of Arizona. 1 In 1670, with other priests, he set out on a mission on the Gila. In 1672, he began a mission among the Yaquis. Before 1679 he and his compan ions had established five missions among Yaquis, Opotes, and Papa- 1 Cozzens's Wonderful Land (Arizona), p. 32. Mr. Cozzens refers to MSS- in the mon astery of Dolores. Kino accompanied Admiral Otondo as early as 1648. of Spain. 588 SPANISH EXPLORATIONS AND COLONIZATION. [CHAP. XXIV. goes. 1 On the left bank of the Gila, he established Encarnacion and San Andres. In San Andres he describes one of the "great houses," four stories in height, which recall the memories of Cibola. His wishes for California were not accomplished until 1697, when Father Salvatierra was appointed to make collections for a mission in Lower California, and at length sailed from Hiagui in that service on the 10th of October. The sedulous efforts by which he and his companions attempted to civilize and Christianize the savages of that peninsula, do The Califor- man Mis- not belong to this narrative. But as a consequence of these plans, a series of missionary efforts grew up, which resulted in the first civilization of the State known as California or the Ameri can Union, the limits of which correspond nearly with those of the province of Upper California, as it is described in the narratives of Mexico. The friendly relations of Father Kino in Sonora on the eastern side of the Gulf of California, with Father Salvatierra on the west side, led constantly to mutual offices of kindness and help ; and the history of the two regions is substantially one history of two provinces, administered in the same spirit and under the same gen eral system. In one expedition of Salvatierra, he passed to the head of the gulf, and satisfied himself that California was indeed a pen insula. " This discovery," he says, " we owe to the holy virgin of Loreto ; " and he adds, " these are the steps by which within a few years California may come to be the soul of this kingdom, the main source of its opulence, the scene of cheerful industry ; and accord ingly I conclude that you will charge all persons that they continue to assist us in these missions of Nuestra Senora de Loreto de Cali- fornias." 2 There was only this external distinction between the missions of California and those of Sonora : that in California a hand ful of soldiers was in each mission placed under the direction of the Fathers. In Sonora, the garrisons, if garrisons there were, were directed immediately by the viceroy. But scarcely any difference in result seems to have arisen from this distinction. It must be under stood that the word Sonora, in the history of that country at that time, includes what is known to our geographers as Arizona. Having selected a point for a mission, the fathers began immediately to invite and induce the Indians to attend the daity religious services. As soon as they themselves acquired the language of the country, they taught the natives the catechism in that language. By way of rewarding those who attended on the services, the fathers served out rations to them, and attempted in the same way to wean all the 1 Noticias Estadicas del Estado de Sonora, by Jose Francisco Velasco. Mexico, 1 850. 2 Veneffas, vol. i., p. 307. English translation. 1697.] MISSIONS IN CALIFORNIA AND ARIZONA. 589 savages from the habits of wanderers. In California all who at tended divine service were wholly supported by the mission. Every morning and night they received an allowance of " atole," a sort of hominy ; at noon they were served with boiled Indian corn, called pozoli, 1 and with fresh or salt meat and vegetables, according as the mission provided. All the sick, aged, and children from six to twelve, and the Indian governor of the village, were also thus provided with food. Beside these, a weekly allowance of the same amount, was made, to such Indians of the rancherias as came to be catechised and as attended the divine service on Sunday. The missionary priest also The Mission Indians. clothed all his parishioners with coarse cloth from Old .Spain, and provided cloaks and blankets. Meanwhile they were instructed in managing the fields and in irrigation ; and as they would not save the crops, Venegas says, the fathers preserved them for their regular use. Wine, which was at an early date produced in the Calif ornian missions, was the only product withheld from them, the fathers early learning that such was the only method to save them from drunkenness. 2 The effect produced by such a system would not immediately ap pear. But, after a generation, a body of children had grown Effectof the to be men and women, without any habits of the chase or of Missious - war, and with the habit of farm labor and regular attendance on the 1 Cozzens's Wondfrftd Land, 37. 2 Venef/as, i. 432. 590 SPANISH EXPLORATIONS AND COLONIZATION. [CHAP. XXIV. rites of the church. The missions were, in many instances, very small establishments. One father with one soldier might be all the white population. The father then appointed one Indian as governor of the village, one to the charge of the church, and a third to be the catechist of those who were undergoing instruction. So simple a system wa& considered sufficient. In the absence of the father the soldier acted as his vicegerent, having " an eye to everything " as is the expressive phrase of Venegas. 1 He could seize delinquents, and mildly punish them, " unless in capital cases," which were referred to the captain of the garrison. The minor punishments were more or less lashes ; the severer punishment was imprisonment in the stocks. The first care in every mission was for the education of the children. Some of them were selected from every California!! mission to be sent to Loreto, the chief station. They were instructed in reading, writing, and singing, and in the Spanish language, and afterwards as they showed ability were promoted to be churchwardens or catechists in the several " rancherias." It is mentioned as an exceptional instance in these plans, that, on the peninsula of California, Father Ugarte taught his Indians to spin wool and weave it, himself making the distaffs, wheels, and looms. He added the industry of making sail-cloth from hemp. This was a violation of the whole colonial system of Spain, which attempted to compel the colonies to obtain all their manufactures from Europe. Venegas, the Jesuit historian, is eloquent in his description of the ruinous effects of this policy in the province of Sonora. The cause. of the poverty of Sonora, he says, is its want of almost all necessary manufactures and trades. While other European nations encourage these in their colonies, Spain depresses them. But the immediate con sequence of manufacture, he says, is the promotion of agriculture, for the providing of the raw material and for feeding the artisan. The policy of Cortez, therefore, was to encourage manufacture, and this policy was continued by some of his successors. But his policy hav ing been overturned, poor Sonora must receive from Mexico the cloth which had been bought in Cadiz, after it had been carried thither from Holland. As the expense of the Jesuit missions involved the feeding and Their sup- clothing of all the converts, neophytes, and catechumens, it was of course considerable, and, so long as any mission was in its infancy, it must be supplied by contributions from the faithful all over the world. At this point the literary ability of the Jesuit brethren was called upon, and the attractive histories of their mis sions, published through Europe, assisted their indefatigable collections 1 Venegas, vol. i., 435. 1705.] ARIZONA. 591 of money. The Fathers never founded a new mission unless some benefactor had endowed it with ten thousand dollars. This sum furnished, at five per cent, interest, five hundred dollars, which was allowed for the support of the missionary and his unavoidable ex penses with the Indians. A royal grant of three hundred dollars for each missionary seems to have provided in part for other missions. Venegas, the historian of Jesuit missions, explains still farther, that the funds for the first seven missions were invested in farms near the city of Mexico, and that the necessary supplies of cattle and of corn were furnished from these farms. To the agent who had these farms in charge the king's payment was made, of eighteen thousand dol lars a year for the payment of the garrisons and of the seamen em ployed by the missions. From these funds, and from the products of the farms, were paid everything necessary for worship, for the build ing and repair of the church and for the maintenance not of the priest only, but of his people. It is interesting, at this time, to ob serve, that in Salvatierra's report of the 25th of May, 1705, he says, " in those parts of the country that are conquered and discovered there are very promising appearances of mines." These anticipations were fully confirmed as that century went on. The acquisitions from mines in Arizona, as we now call it, and from Sonora cannot be accurately distinguished. But it is certain that Arizona well earned its name, which is derived from Arizuma, a name said to be given by the king himself to denote its richness in silver. As early as 1683, the attorney of the king brought a suit in Sonora to recover a mass of virgin silver weighing twenty-eight hun dred pounds, which he claimed as a " curiosity," although it was found in the mine of an explorer named Gandera. 1 A wide desert separated the silver- bearing parts of Arizona from the Pacific. A long transport by land separated them from the Gulf of Mexico. But the traces of old mining operations and the records of the viceroyalty of Mexico alike show, that in face of these discouragements, very large mining operations were conducted in the seventeenth and eight eenth centuries in the frontier provinces which are now States and Territories of the United States. The tranquil arrangements of the Jesuits, which attempted to sub stitute for savage life the proprieties and decorum of pueblos D iffi cultieg of men and women trained to act like obedient children, were by C t hTMu e - d constantly broken in upon by savage uprisings, which the slonanes - fathers considered as so many triumphs of the devil. As early as 1695 the Janos, Jocomes, and Apaches were at war. The Conchos Indians joined in the fray, which was for the time suppressed by 1 Cozzens, as above, p. 41. 592 SPANISH EXPLORATIONS AND COLONIZATION. [CHAP. XXIV. the energetic efforts of Antonio de Soils, the military commandant. But none the less on all sides of the frontier were there fears of a general rising. An Indian called Pablo Quihue was considered the head of a conspiracy. He had been the governor, under the scheme just now described, of the mission of Santa Maria Basieraca, but he now proved faithless to his masters. He told all the natives that in the last sixty years they had gradually given away all their lands to the Spaniards ; that the fathers, instead of acknowledging such gifts gratefully, had seized the lands and enslaved the people. Lands, flocks, herds, houses, women, and children were all at the disposal of the priests. " Do they tell you that their soldiers protect you ? Do they tell you that they will defend you ? Do they tell you that you live in true religion, in obedience to the king and in peaceful life? So they told us when they came, and we, like fools, received them as men who came from heaven to bless us. What has come of these magnificent promises ? You can see. The Apaches, the Jocomes, the Janos, have for years desolated our fields and stolen our flocks. Have the fathers protected us ? Have their soldiers helped us ; have they not been our ruin ? Have more Sonoras, Pimas, Tarau- mares, and Conchos fallen under the arrows of the Apaches, than have perished under the cruelty of the Spaniards. At the least alarm, they charge us, whom they have enslaved, with being apostates, traitors to God and to the king, enemies of our coun try and allies and accomplices of the Apaches ! They show more enmity Indian Council (from La Hontan). t o us than to them ! Do they treat them as cruelly as they treat us ? Have the Apaches ever seen their faces ? And have they ever hurt us so much, as these protectors of ours?" Such is the remarkable speech, which Allegre, a Jesuit histo rian, is frank enough to put into the mouth of this rebel. 1 So well founded were his arguments, so imposing the outside force Anunsuc- ^ ^ ue Apaches, and so hateful the Spaniards, that his hopes dianrebeT- might have been crowned with success, but that, by an ac cident so often repeated in savage annals, the conspiracy broke out too early in one quarter. The Cuquiarachi, Cuchuta, and Teurcicatzi broke into rebellion before his plans were ripe. The peo ple of these places seized the ornaments of the churches and fled with them into the mountains. This precipitancy disarranged all the plans 1 Allegre, iii., 93 : Mexican edition. 1697.] LNDIAN INVASIONS. 593 A of Quihue. The rebellion was suppressed ; and the fathers were able to praise the loyalty of riiany of the pueblos, whose people joined with the Spanish soldiery in the movements necessary, and in one case sus tained a battle which lasted from day to night, without their assist ance. In 1697 new invasions from the Apaches and Jocomes wasted So- nora ; and again the suspicions of the Spaniards were roused against the people of their own flocks, including Pimeria, . . r . TM Theinvad- as the missions among the r imos began to be called at that * re time. It was true that the Pimos suffered as much as the Spaniards, or more, but they fell under the suspicion which in all col onies, English, Spanish, or French, has always hovered over con verted Indians. An inspection by a Spanish officer wholly relieved them from this suspicion. It proved that they had beaten the Apaches in fight, as they do to this day, and were in no way entangled with them. His report estimates the num bers of the Opas and Maricopas as about 4,000. He speaks of their aqueducts and fertile land, their crops of wheat and houses of adobe, much as a traveller of to-day might do. But it must be re membered that they then occupied a site lower down the Gila River than that which they live upon to-day. 1 At length, on the 30th of March, the chief of the Quiburi, one of the " reduced " or converted tribes, struck a fortu nate blow with his people upon the marauders and wholly defeated them. By this blow, rather than from any action of the Spanish troops, as would appear, the tranquillity of the missions was for some time assured. In a pastoral visit made to the northern stations at this time Father Kino made an observation of latitude at St. Ra fael de Actun, which fixes that place as in the parallel of 32 30' 45" north. He frequently alludes in his letters to the certainty that Cal ifornia is a peninsula, as it had been pronounced by Cortez and his 1 Emory's report, on the authority of Kit Carson. VOL. ii. 38 msms*fi California Indians catching Salmon. 594 SPANISH EXPLORATIONS AND COLONIZATION. [CHAP. XXIV. contemporaries. The later geographers, for a long time, insisted on marking it as a long island ; and it was long before the intelligent assertions of the Jesuit Fathers, though founded on personal observa tions, were attended to by the map-makers. In January, 1699, on one of these tours of inspection, Fathers Kino and Gilg met five hun dred Yumas, Opas, and Cocomaricopas at a point three leagues above the junction of the Gila and Colorado. These people had traditions of the arrival of Spaniards from the east, which probably referred to the party of Onate. They told of a visit from a white woman whom the Fathers supposed to be an enthusiast named Maria de Jesus Agre- da, who had gone out alone as early as 1630, among the savages. c Junction of the Gila and Colorado Rivers. These people also said that at the north there lived white men who wore clothes, who at times came armed to the Colorado, and brought goods in exchange for skins. This can only allude to some expedition of French traders, of which we have no account, or possibly to the expedition from Boston, already alluded to, which is said to have pre ceded by a year the expedition of La Salle. So far at least, as their written history goes, the flourishing condi tion of the Pimeria, which was the result of the Jesuit labors in Arizona, ended with the death of Father Kino in the year 1711. This remarkable man, one of the most suc cessful and enterprising of apostles, had been a professor of math ematics in the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria. By a divine call Death of Father Kino. 1711.] DECAY OF THE JESUIT MISSIONS. 595 he was led to abandon his professorship and to enter on the work of preaching the gospel to the heathen. His indomitable spirit, his cour age and adventure, led him to such successes, as have been described. His zeal constantly outran the slower notions of the Mexican Vice roys, and he was frequently in conflict with them and with other au thorities. It was only after long delay that his plans for the reduc tion, as it was called, of California, were adopted ; and he was fre quently held back in his undertakings in his beloved Pimeria. It is said that he himself baptized more than forty thousand infidels. and that he would have baptized many thousand more had the zeal of the church behind him been sufficient to provide them with teachers and ministers. San Xavier del Bac, as it now appears, gives an idea of the external appearance of the churches he founded. The people of The Mission of San Xavier del Bac. Arizona believe this building to be the very same which was erected under his direction. In this temple the worship of the Catholic church is still maintained by a handful of Papajo Indians. His successor was Father Augustin de Campos. But he could not prevent the decay of the missions. Probably the enthusiasm D ec ayof the of Europe and Mexico had been turned in other directions, B and it was impossible to provide ecclesiastical chiefs for these frontier settlements. The slow death settling upon Spain, attributed by most students of history to the inevitable lethargy attendant on Jesuit counsels, hindered the aid which the Spanish monarchs themselves often tried to give the missions. Nothing is more amusing, if it were not at the same time pathetic, than the narrative by Venegas of the ingenious ways in which the officials of the crown resisted and de feated the pious orders of their kings. For many years, the Jesuit historian tells us, the people of the villages maintained their crops and built their houses in a civilized way. But as time passed, they fell 596 SPANISH EXPLORATIONS AND COLONIZATION. [CHAP. XXIV. back toward the habits of savage life. Many of the villages had no Spanish ministers till 1731, when a sudden revival for a mo ment filled the posts anew. Dolores and Remedies were entirely unpeopled, and many others suffered from the invasions of the Apaches. In 1740 a rebellion broke out, more critical than any before, led by an "apostate" Indian named Muni, one of the Yaquis, dian rebel- another named Baltazar, and another named Juan Calixto. Succeeding in Mayo they passed to Cedros and Bayorca. Muni was at one moment taken prisoner, but having been liberated he was so far encouraged that with his Yaquis he continued his rav ages. So efficient was this rebellion that the villages of the valley of the Gila were wholly cut off from Mexican inspection, and, indeed, they have remained in much that condition ever since. In 1744 Father Keeler, who attempted to revisit them, was permitted to pass no farther than the first village of the Moquis. A second revolt in 1750, under one Luis, did still more to break up the missions of the southern part of Sonora, which now constitutes the Mexican .state of that name, and well-nigh completed the isolation of Pimeria in the valley of the Gila. The authority of Luis over the Pimeria was not broken until the year 1753, when a new governor seized him and put him in prison, where he soon died of "melancholy." His relative took refuge with the Seris, a barbarous tribe on the Gulf of Califor nia, always their enemies till now. Some fathers were despatched, after this success, to renew the abandoned missions ; but it would ap pear that their decay could not be arrested. Their history is at the bottom the same as that of the Jesuit mis sions in Paraguay, which have attracted more of the attention of stu dents of social order. By these experiments it is proved possible to The lesson educate savages in a state of tutelage, and to maintain the these h a y outward external aspects of exquisite order and simplicity, tempts. rphe lover of tranquillity, delighted with such social order when he sees it contrasted with the strifes of a more active world, describes the pretty scene as an Arcadia, if he be of a classical bent ; or as the kingdom of heaven on earth, if he be trained in another school. But the moment a storm comes, or the moment the mild tyranny of the spiritual father is removed, it proves that this people, so gentle and so simple, have not been educated to the care of themselves. They have been taught to obey, in a false school, which has not taught them either to direct or to command. And the lovely village, so charming to the traveller who sees it from the outside for a day or two, is swept away, like a vision of the night, and leaves almost as little trace behind. 1767.] EXPULSION OF THE JESUITS. 597 The expul- sionptthe FOB the missions of Pimeria and of Upper California, the final blow was struck, so far as Jesuit supervision went, on the 25th of June, 1767. "A little before the break of day," says the historian, with a certain pathos, "the decree for the expulsion of the Jesuits went forth, with the great seal itself, from the council chamber of Charles III." In the endless intrigues, in which the history of the com pany of Jesuits is involved, per haps from its own nature, the balance had gone against it heav ily, at that moment, in the dying court of Spain. King Charles was so eager to secure the execution of his decree that by an autograph letter to the viceroy of Mexico he notified his will, and the ex pulsion of the Jesuits from Mex ico followed with much more ra pidity than had attended the ex ecution of many of the decrees in their favor. The accounts given by the Jesuit writers and their enemies as to the origin of this decree, belong rather to the history of Europe than to that of T>. T, j , ,i rimeria. It was due to the in fluence of Choiseul and Aranda, who seem to have succeeded in con vincing Charles that the Jesuits had circulated slanders regarding his own birth. Certain is it that the blow was sudden and unexpected. Portrait of Charles III. of Spain, When, in 1683, the French explorer, La Salle, addressed to the king of France his memoir on the foundation of a colony in New Mexico Louisiana, the silver mines of New Mexico were so well es- and Texas - tablished, that the prime reason suggested by him for his enterprise, was the ease with which the French might seize the product of those mines, and bring it down the Red River. After two hundred years, that route is not yet taken by the silver of New Mexico and the neighboring regions. But it may yet prove true, that by a railway through the valley of the Red River these stores of silver, the magni tude of which has deranged the balance of the coinage of the world,, may find their way to their market. The Spanish government was as quick as La Salle to note the danger to their mines from his enter- 598 SPANISH EXPLORATIONS AND COLONIZATION. [CHAP. XXIV. prise. When his unfortunate colony landed, in fact within the. limits of our State of Texas, 1 in Matagorda Bay, which they called the Bay of St. Bernard, the nearest Spanish positions on the gulf were the port of Panuco, near the present Tampico, more than two hundred leagues distant, and El Paso on the Rio Grande. The Spanish settlers had been driven from New Mexico by the rising of 1680, nor was possession regained until 1695. Early in 1686 the viceroy of Mexico, Laguna, was informed of the French expedition of La Salle. But its destination was unknown ; and the historian of Texas believes that the Spaniards learned from the Camanche Indians of the colony in St. Bernard's Bay. A council held in Mexico determined on an expedi tion of discovery and repression, and to this expedition Captain Alonzo de Leon was appointed, under the title of Governor of Coahuila. De Leon arrived at Fort St. Louis on the 22d of April, with his Expedition command of one hundred men. He found there the wreck of DC Leon. o ^ ne un O rtunate French colony ; and, learning from the Indians that there were French stragglers among the Cenis, he visited them and found two of the murderers of La Salle, whom he took pris oners. They were sent to Mexico and thence to Spain, and then sent back to Mexico and condemned to the mines. De Leon made a favorable report as to Texas, and it was determined to establish a mission at Fort St. Louis. In 1690 this was done. The king approved of this proceeding, saying it was of importance for the security of his dominions in New Mexico. Venegas, the historian of California, expresses a mild regret that the necessities of the crown diverted to this enterprise treasure which he is sure could have been well used on the Pacific shore. But the French were too near for delay. It would indeed seem as if, till this time, the policy of Spain had been that ascribed to the ancient Persian prince, who kept a por tion of desert three days journey in width between his own empire and many others. But Texas was then a desert far more than three days wide. If such were the policy, it gave way before the danger that other colonists might inhabit the desert. In 1691, Don Domingo Teran was appointed governor of Coahuila and Texas, and with fifty soldiers and seven lay friars, proceeded to establish missions and mili tary posts. These they began, but in 1693 they were all abandoned, in face of hostile Indians, and the king approved of the abandonment. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, therefore, Spain had no posts in Texas. On the west side of the Rio Grande, the posts still known as Presidio del Norte and El Paso were maintained as stations on the road to New Mexico. When in 1712, Louis XIV. gave to Antoine Crozat a grant of 1 See chap. xxi. 1714.] ATTEMPTS TO COLONIZE TEXAS. 599 Louisiana, it was so phrased as to extend his boundaries to the Rio Grande on the west. In 1714, he sent out Huchereau St. Ex p ed j tion Denis, a young man of noble family, on an expedition to of st - Dems - the western part of his new domain. Leaving Natchitoches on the Red River, where a trading post had already been established, St. Denis crossed Texas, and in August reached the mission of St. John Baptist on the Rio Grande, where he was hospitably received by the commander. But, so soon as Don Gaspardo Anaya, the Governor of Coahuila, heard of his arrival he arrested St. Denis and one of his El Paso. companions and sent them to Mexico, where they were imprisoned for six months. After two years, however, he returned to Mobile, having escaped or been released. He married the daughter of Villeseas, the governor of St. John Baptist, and from that day began a system of smuggling between the Mexican territories and those of Louisiana, which has continued to this time. 1 Those movements alarmed the Spaniards again, and the Duke of Linares, now Viceroy of Mexico, made new efforts to prose- Spani8h at _ cute the colonization of Texas. A new mission was estab- eoZ^e* lished in the Bay of St. Bernard, and one among the Adaes, Texas - only fifteen miles from Natchitoches. It was therefore within the pres ent line of the State of Louisiana. A mission called Dolores was 1 Yoaknm, Hist. Texas, vol. i., 48. American State Papers, vol. xii. Mr. Gayarre has made a romance from these adventures. 600 SPANISH EXPLORATIONS AND COLONIZATION. [CHAP. XXIV. established west of the Sabine, and San Antonio de Valero was placed on the right bank of the San Pedro, about three fourths of a mile from the present church at San Antonio. The present position of San Antonio was soon after chosen instead of the first, for reasons which recommend themselves to every visitor to that beautiful city. Soon after, a mission was established near the present town of Nacog- doches, and a sixth near San Augustine. The establishment of these missions was intrusted to a captain named Don Domingo Ramon. When he was at the Adaes he visited San Denis at Natchitoches, and was hospitably received. San Antonio, Texas. The Texan missions were from the first in the hands of Franciscan fathers. But the methods of these fathers were not materially different from those which we have described as practised by the Jesuits. At each presidio or mission there was a garrison, with a military commandant ; but these garrisons were sometimes very small. A plaza de armas, surrounded by the church, barracks, storehouses, and other public buildings, was the centre of the establishment. Around these huts were built for the " reduced " or converted Indians. After the declaration of war of 1718 between France and Spain had conflicts be- been heard of on this distant frontier, the little garrisons m ade an attempt to imitate the contentions of their masters - n Europe. The Frenchmen, La Harpe and St. Denis, broke up the Spanish posts and drove the garrisons from the lesser stations to San Antonio. The Marquis de Aguayo, the Spanish Governor of New Estremadura, collected five hundred men to drive them back, but they had already retreated, and Don Aguayo reestablished the garrisons J which they had put to flight. 1 Am. State Papers, vol. xii. Spanish. 1728.] THE SPANIARDS IN TEXAS. 601 In the same year Don Martin d'Alarcone had been appointed Governor of Texas. After the success of Aguayo's expedition, a larger army was fitted out against the French settlements on the Upper Mis sissippi. The Spaniards lost their route, and falling in with the Mis souri Indians, mistook them for Osages. They had relied on the as sistance of the Osages against the French. Now, the Missouris were the firm allies of the French. The Missouris had the address to encourage the mistake, till they had received from the Spaniards pis tols, sabres, hatchets, and what the narrator speaks of as fifteen hun dred muskets, a number which is incredible. With these arms, how ever, the Indians massacred all the Spaniards except the priest, and this misfortune ended the Spanish claims on the Upper Mississippi. 1 The French home government, in the meanwhile, ordered Bienville to establish a new post in Matagorda Bay, which he did. But the de tachment was soon withdrawn on account of the hostility of the Indians. A royal order of 1721 directed the Spanish authorities to attempt no further hostilities against the French, but to fortify the bay of St. Bernard and other important posts. A garrison progress of called "our Lady of Loretto " was accordingly established Spanish at St. Bernard. In the next year the four garrisons which defended Texas, consisted of one hundred men at the Adaes Mission, twenty-five at the Neches, ninety at the bay of St. Bernard, and fifty- three at San Antonio. There were no colonists, excepting the fathers, at the missions, but Aguayo, before returning to his own department, recommended the introduction of colonists. So soon as he departed, the forbidden trade between French and Spanish frontiersmen began again, and when, in the war of 1726, France and Spain were in alli ance, this trade gained new activity. 2 , In 1728 the Spanish government ordered the transportation of four hundred families from the Canary Islands to Texas. The garrisons were reduced to one hundred and fifty-three men in the whole prov ince. Of the four hundred families ordered, thirteen arrived at San Antonio, and this new population was a stimulus to the missionary efforts. In 1732 the Spanish troops defeated the Apaches, and this victory gave security to the colony. In 1734 Sandoval took the place of Cevallos as governor, and again checked the depredations of the savages. While he was Governor, St. Denis removed the French gar rison of Natchitoches to a point west of the Red River. Sandoval having been charged with conniving with this, a long litigation took place, with the interminable slowness of Spanish procedures, in 1 Gayarre's Hist, of Louisiana, vol. i., p. 264. 2 Yoakum, i., 77. 802 SPANISH EXPLORATIONS AND COLONIZATION. [CHAP. XXIV. which he and Franquis, his successor, were engaged. In 1740 Sando- val was thrown into prison, in one of the consequences of this charge, but with the arrival of a new governor, he was liberated. In 1744 the European population of Texas did not exceed fifteen hundred, divided mostly between Adaes and San Antonio ; a few were at Bahia, and a, few at San Saba. The settlements to the south of Texas made but very little progress, and the old policy of Spain, to leave a desert between her provinces and her neighbors, was in no way violated. The Yucca Tree of New Mexico.