Chapter IX

THE IMMEDIATE SUCCESSORS OF LA SALLE, AND EARLY COLONIZATION
BETWEEN THE ALLEGHANIES AND THE MISSISSIPPI.

THE work begun by La Salle was taken up, after the peace of Ryswick (1697) had terminated the war between the French and English, by Lemoyne D’Iberville, a Canadian by birth, who, in 1698, sailed for the mouth of the Mississippi from San Domingo, accompanied by his two brothers, Sauville and Bienville, two hundred colonists, and a few women and children.

After a successful voyage, our hero cast anchor in the present Mobile Bay (N. lat. 30° 40′, W. long. 80°), and on the 2d February, 1699, landed his people on Ship Island, where huts were at once erected for the temporary shelter of the emigrants. While this work was in progress, D’Iberville explored the neighboring Bay of Biloxi and the mouth of the Pensacola River――already, as we know, visited more than once by the Spanish――and at the end of the month made his way thence, with forty-eight picked followers, to the mouth of the Mississippi.

Entering the muddy waters, encumbered by the floating trunks of rotting trees, which formed the outlet of the great Father of Waters, the explorers sailed slowly on between the low alluvial banks till they came to a Bayagoula village, just below the junction of the Red River with the Mississippi, where all doubt as to their having found the mighty stream they sought was set at rest by the production of a letter, in their own language, left with the Indians by Tonti long years before.

Now completely satisfied as to his whereabouts, D’Iberville made his way back to Ship Island in a south-easterly direction, through the Manshac Pass and Lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain, so named after two French ministers accompanying the expedition. Finding the colonists suffering from the unhealthiness of their situation, their leader sanctioned their removal to the Bay of Biloxi, where a fort was at once erected, which was to insure to the French the peaceful possession of the vast tracts allotted to them by their monarch, extending from the Rio Grande, or Rio Bravo del Norte, now forming the boundary between Texas and Mexico, to the 85th degree of west longitude.

Having thus laid the foundation of what he hoped would become a great French empire in the South, which should gradually extend until it met and coalesced with that of the North, D’Iberville returned to France to win new recruits for his enterprise, leaving his brothers in charge of the infant settlement.

Thus left for a time to its own resources, the little colony struggled on as best it could――the monotony of its life in the barren wastes on which it had been set down broken only by an occasional visit from some missionary, who would appear suddenly at the mouth of the Mississippi, after a wild trip from his distant station, in his birch-bark canoe――until its very existence was threatened by the sudden appearance of two well-armed English vessels, under the command of Coxe, a physician, who had bought up an old patent granting the territory occupied by the French to Robert Heath.

Coxe had come to claim the lands on either side of the Mississippi, and to explore his new possessions. Entering the great highway, he sailed up unmolested for about fifty miles, when he was met by Bienville, also engaged in explorations, who, seeing how powerless he would be to resist the intruder, solved the difficulty by assuring him that the river was not the Mississippi, but another stream belonging to the French.

Suspecting no treachery, Coxe turned back, and the spot which witnessed this somewhat ignominious retreat is still known as the English Turn. The emigrants――most of them Huguenot refugees, who had accompanied the unsuccessful Englishmen――settled in Carolina; and though they subsequently begged to be allowed to join their fellow-countrymen in Louisiana, they were refused permission to do so by the French monarch.

The close of the year witnessed the return of D’Iberville with sixty emigrants from Canada, whom he settled at a spot about fifty miles from the mouth of the Mississippi. While engaged in erecting a fort for the protection of the new colony, he was visited by our old friend Tonti, the companion of La Salle’s early explorations, and in company with him he ascended the river as far as the Natchez country, where a third settlement, first called Rosalie, and afterward Natchez, was founded.

A little later, the knowledge of this part of the country was further extended by a trip made by Bienville across the Red River, an important tributary of the Mississippi, to Natchitoches; and about the same time Le Sœur, another adventurous Frenchman, ascended the great river as far as the Falls of St. Anthony, penetrating into the prairies of Missouri, and spending a whole winter among the Iowa Indians.

Unfortunately, these isolated efforts were not seconded by any well-organized attempts to trace the courses of the affluents of the Mississippi, or to gain information respecting the habits of the natives; and the vast tracts on either side of the Father of Waters remained pathless wastes to the European throughout the reign of the French in the Southern States. That reign, however, was not of very long duration. Yellow fever and other terrible complaints, which still have their haunt in the low lands on the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico, soon began to work havoc among the settlers at Mobile and the outlying homesteads; and in 1703, only one hundred and fifty of the many emigrants who had settled from time to time in Louisiana survived. In 1719, a fresh impulse, and that of an extraordinary kind, was given to emigration to the most southerly districts owned by France, by that gigantic commercial bubble known as the “Mississippi Scheme,” which, projected by John Law, Comptroller-General of the finances of France in the minority of Louis XV., will long be remembered as having brought about the ruin of thousands. The company to which the working out of Law’s scheme was intrusted was called the Company of the West, and owned the exclusive privilege of trading to the Mississippi, farming the taxes and coining the money of the states to be formed. Thousands of whites and hundreds of negroes to serve as their slaves, were introduced to Louisiana under the auspices of the new company; Bienville was appointed governor in the room of his brother D’Iberville, who had fallen a victim to yellow fever; a site was chosen for the capital of the empire, which was to rise from the graves of so many Europeans, and the foundation stones were laid of the modern city of New Orleans, so called in honor of the then Regent of France.

Only one short year after this imposing beginning, the Mississippi bubble burst; John Law became a bankrupt and an outcast; the lands on the Mississippi, assigned at enormous cost to those whom he had duped, remained unoccupied, and emigration suddenly ceased. The seeds already sown bore good fruit, however, in the gradual extension of the French outposts northward. The settlers who had come out to make their fortunes remained to struggle for bare existence, and the middle of the 18th century found the northern half of Louisiana under the care of Jesuit missionaries, while the seaboard districts were watched over by Capuchin friars. The presence of these zealous teachers of Christianity could not, however, prevent many a terrible struggle with the natives, who again and again made a futile effort to rid themselves of the intruders, the justice of whose appropriation of their lands they naturally failed to see.

Illustration: NEW ORLEANS.

Into the terrible details of Indian massacres and French retaliations we need not enter here; suffice it to say, that when, in 1754, an English grant of lands to the Ohio Company brought on the French war, the soil of the Mississippi valley had already received that baptism of native blood which seems to have been everywhere a preliminary sowing for the harvests of the white man. The struggle which gave to Great Britain the vast hyperborean regions of America, and to which we shall have presently to refer again, also shook the power of France in the South, and resulted, first, in the cession, in 1763, of the lands on the east of the Mississippi to England, while Spain acquired those in the West; and, in 1804, in the purchase by the American Government of the whole region between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains, a transaction doubling the area of the United States, and ushering in a new era of discovery. Before we accompany the heroes deputed to explore scientifically the newly-acquired districts, however, we must complete our story of the colonization of the so-called middle states by joining Daniel Boone, to whom is due the honor of having been the first to settle beyond the Alleghany Mountains, which had long formed the western limit alike of colonization and travel.

Illustration: (‡ Daniel Boone)

Boone, whose early life was passed in North Carolina, was first led to turn his attention to the “Far West,” as Kentucky and Tennessee were called in the early days of which we are writing, by the glowing accounts given of the exuberant soil and vast quantity of game met with on either side of the Kentucky River by a hunter named John Finley. In 1767, Finley penetrated almost into the rich cane-brakes of Kentucky; and two years later, he and five other men of a similar stamp persuaded Boone to be their leader in an exploring expedition to the newly-discovered hunting-grounds.

On the 9th June, 1769, the little band started on their arduous trip from Boone’s house on the Yadkin, and made their way on foot up a rugged mountain of the Alleghany range, the summit of which was reached as the sun was setting. Before them lay the fertile valley of Kentucky, with its rolling plains, tenanted by the buffalo, the deer, and other game, alternating with rugged hills, while beyond stretched vast forests haunted by the wild red men, members of the Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Shawanol tribes, who were as yet untamed by intercourse with the white man.

After a couple of months of successful hunting, the party divided for the more thorough exploration of the country. Boone and a man named Stewart, whose fortunes alone concern us now, reached the Red River north of the Kentucky, where, as they were preparing for the night, they were surprised by a party of Indians, who made them prisoners, and treated them, some say with reckless cruelty, others with rude hospitality. In any case, they were not very securely guarded, for, on the seventh night after their capture, they managed to get away, and while wandering about in the woods, they were met by Boone’s brother, who had followed his track, and another adventurer from North Carolina, who had followed the track of the pioneers through the wilderness.

Cheered by good news from home, and by the companionship of the newcomers, Boone resumed his explorations with fresh courage; but a little later he and Stewart again fell into the hands of Indians. This time Stewart was scalped, though Boone escaped and rejoined his brother, with whom, and the third white man, he decided to spend the winter in the wilderness, and collect furs with which to trade in the spring. The third white man, whose name does not transpire, shortly afterward got separated from his companions, and was never again seen alive. A skeleton and some pieces of clothing, found long years afterward near a swamp, are supposed to have been his, but no details of his fate were ever discovered.

Illustration: BACKWOODSMEN.

In spite of this second tragedy, the brothers carried out their plan. Building a comfortable log hut to shelter them at night, they spent the days in hunting game, and when the spring of the ensuing year approached, they had collected a vast stock of the skins of wild beasts which had fallen beneath their unerring aim. It was now decided that the elder brother, Squire Boone, should return to North Carolina for supplies, while Daniel remained alone in his primitive habitation to protect the peltry and add to the stock. For three months Daniel wandered about alone, making a tour of observation to the South, and exploring the country on either side of the Silt and Green Rivers. On the 27th July, Squire Boone returned and the brothers together made their way to the important Cumberland River, a tributary of the Ohio, where they found traveling difficult on account of the number of so-called sink-holes, the depressions resulting from the sinking of the earth after heavy rains in a limestone country.

In March, 1771, we find the energetic explorers again on the Kentucky River, where they resolved to form a settlement, and whence they started in the ensuing month for the Yadkin of North Carolina to bring out their families. Two years elapsed before the necessary arrangements could be made, and meanwhile rumors reached the Eastern States of explorations made by other parties, who, without any preconcerted plans, were simultaneously wandering about on the banks of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers. In June, 1769, but one month after the first entry into Kentucky of Boone, some twenty men, from North Carolina and West Virginia, made their way over the Alleghanies, and through the Cumberland mountain pass to the river of the same name, into the south-west of Kentucky, the whole of which they thoroughly scoured, returning home in April, 1770, laden with the results of their hunting excursions.

In the same year, 1769, a second company of hunters built a boat and two trapping canoes, and in them paddled down the Cumberland River to the Ohio, and again down the Ohio to the Mississippi, embarking on which they made their way to Natchez, where they sold their furs to great advantage. This was of more importance to them than the fact that this trip of theirs connected the work of the English from the East with that of the French from the South, which alone entitles them to a place in our narrative.

In 1771, the Cumberland was again navigated, this time from the north, by Casper Mansso and some half a dozen companions, who penetrated into the so-called barrens of the south of Kentucky, where they met other hunters from the East. Thus, by the time of Boone’s return in 1773, Kentucky, though still unsettled by any white man, was no longer the unknown district it had been on his first visit, and he appeared to have many rivals in the field.

The little caravan of settlers, which included Boone’s own family and that of five others, started on its arduous journey across the Alleghanies in September, 1773, and in the now well-known Powell’s Valley its numbers were augmented by forty well-armed men, who had determined to throw in their lot with the emigrants. The transit of Powell’s Gap or Pass was succeeded by that of Wallen’s Ridge, and the augmented party were entering the last of the triple range of mountains by the way of Cumberland Gap, when they were suddenly attacked by Indians. Six white men, including Boone’s eldest son James, were killed, and the cattle were dispersed, before the Indians were driven back. This tragedy so disheartened the emigrants that they declined to go further; and though Boone, in spite of his intense grief at the loss of his boy, would have persevered, he was obliged to yield to the numbers against him.

Back again then the survivors tramped, and took refuge at an outpost in the south-west of Virginia, where Boone remained, eating his heart out in compulsory inaction, until June, 1774, when, to his intense delight, he received an appointment as agent to a North Carolina company for purchasing lands in Kentucky. At the head of a party of surveyors, Boone joyfully started once more for the land which he looked upon as his own, and after a long journey, of which unfortunately, no details have been preserved, he stood again upon the shores of the Kentucky River, which he thoroughly surveyed with the help of his comrades, returning in safety in the ensuing year to his family in southern Virginia.

The reports given by Boone and others of the fertile lands in Kentucky resulted in the formation of a company, at the head of which was a man named Richard Henderson, for the purchase from the Cherokee Indians of a vast tract of land in Ohio and Kentucky, the natives having, by various hostile demonstrations, given proof of their intention not to permit the quiet appropriation of their soil. Daniel Boone, as having already had some intercourse, though not of the most encouraging kind, with the Cherokees, was chosen as the agent in the negotiation, and, after much speechifying, he obtained a hundred square miles of territory on the Kentucky and Ohio, an old warrior closing the final bargain with the words, “Brother, we give you fine land, but you will have trouble in settling it.”

The shrewd sachem was right, for Virginia refused to recognize the purchase from the Indians as valid, and claimed all the lands between its western boundaries and the Mississippi for its own. Not until after a long and weary period of litigation was Boone able to realize the wish of his heart, and lay the foundations of the first settlement in Kentucky. His company had to be content, after all, with a very limited district to colonize; and after he had built his first fort, to which the name of Boonesborough was given in his honor, on the south side of the Kentucky River, he was greatly harassed by the treacherous attacks of the Cherokees, who, although they had received the value of two thousand pounds sterling in goods for their lands, lost no opportunity of annoying the white intruders.

In spite of all these difficulties, Boonesborough was ready in 1774 for the reception of Mrs. Boone and her children, and in the ensuing year the infant settlement was reënforced by the arrival of three other families. The summer of 1775 also witnessed the establishment of many other stations, including that of Louisville, on the Ohio, which soon became a kind of rendezvous for hunters, and a harbor of refuge for emigrants seeking a suitable site for the building of their new homes in the wilderness. Gradually the forests of oak, maple, walnut, etc., of Ohio, the now well-cultivated agricultural districts of Kentucky, and the less fertile cretaceous regions of Tennessee, became dotted with the homes of settlers, each of which in time sent forth new pioneers yet further to the westward.

The conclusion of the war between Great Britain and her mighty colonies in 1783, which gave to English America a political constitution of its own, was succeeded by a tide of emigration across the Alleghanies, and all the best districts for settlement in Tennessee and Kentucky were rapidly filled. In 1788, the Ohio Company, from New England, formed a settlement of considerable size on the north-west of the river from which it took its name, and after a long, desultory struggle with the Wyandots, Delawares, ♦Potawatomies, Kickapoos, Piankashaws, Miamis, and other tribes occupying the surrounding districts, obtained a legal claim to their lands in 1795 by their purchase from the natives by the United States Government. The peaceable possession of these rich territories thus secured, they were soon portioned out into townships: city after city rose in the wilderness; and, to quote from a traveler who crossed the Alleghanies at the period of which we are writing, “Old America seemed to be breaking up and moving westward.” Every state sent forth its bands of emigrants, and no traveler on the now well-worn tracts across the formidable mountain ridge, dividing the old homes from the new, could advance far without coming upon family groups pausing for the return of some father or brother who had seen his dear ones part of the way.

♦ ‘Pottawatomies’ replaced with ‘Potawatomies’

By the close of the 18th century, Ohio was also completely filled up by the settlements of the white men, while the natives, who had sold their birthright, slowly retreated before them into the present states of Illinois and Indiana. But yet again the same programme was gone through. The whites, to whom so much room had already been given, clamored for more; again their Government listened to their demands. The level lands, watered by sluggish streams, between the Ohio and the Wabash, were bought as those of Ohio had been, and received, as if in irony of the unlucky Indians who had taken refuge there, the name of Indiana. In a similar manner was formed the State of Illinois, the Sack, Fox, and other more northerly tribes ceding their territories as readily as their southern neighbors had done.

Now and then some pioneer penetrated into the southern districts of Michigan, where, as we know, the French had long since established outposts, and in which were now situated Detroit and Mahimillimac, the two chief seats of the Canadian fur-trade. In 1803, the purchase by the Americans of five millions of acres between Lakes Michigan and Huron brought the emigrants from the States face to face with those from Canada. There were no more unoccupied districts to be bought in the neighborhood of the Great Lakes; and it will be in company with the scientific explorers of modern times that we shall renew our acquaintance with the border lands between the American Republic and Canada.

Returning in the wake of emigration to the South, we find the cession of French territory to the Americans in 1763 resulting in the influx, into the districts between Georgia and the Mississippi, of a vast number of adventurers from the old states and the new. The general name of Louisiana, given by the first comers to the whole of the valley of the Mississippi, became restricted to the small state between the Father of Waters and the then Spanish Texas, while the new and important American settlements on the east of the great river were called Mississippi in its honor. A little later, the tract between the new state of Mississippi and Georgia was settled under the title of Alabama, and of all the eastern districts between the St. Lawrence and the sea there remained but Florida――still, in spite of a temporary change of ownership between 1763 and 1801, in the hands of the Spanish――to be acquired by the ambitious American Government. That its possession was eagerly coveted will be readily understood, and after a long series of negotiations, combined with the occasional use of force, it was annexed to the great republic in 1821.

As a matter of course, the Mississippi was not long allowed to present any barrier either to emigration or exploration, and the taking possession of the districts on the east was but a preliminary step toward the acquisition of the vast tracts stretching away to the Pacific on the west.

After a long and somewhat stormy series of negotiations, Texas, first visited by La Salle in his vain quest for the mouth of the Mississippi, and afterward colonized by the Spanish from Mexico, was ceded to the all-powerful American republic, and, being rapidly settled by enterprising emigrants from the East, it soon in its turn formed the starting-point for new expeditions westward. First California, and then Arizona and New Mexico, became the property of the United States, while the intervening districts between the first state on the Pacific seaboard to become the property of the American republic and the Mississippi were gradually filled up by an ever-increasing tide of emigration from the East and from the South, from the North and from the West. Step by step, little by little, the red men receded before the march of the whites, making every now and then a deeply pathetic, but ever futile attempt to stem the advance of their insidious destroyers. What was originally a vast population of some millions of aborigines――ranking among them, to quote the words of their great historian, Hubert Howe Bancroft, “every phase of primitive humanity, from the reptile-eating cave-dweller of the Great Basin to the Aztec and Maya-Quiché civilization of the southern table-land ... vanished at the touch of European civilization, and their unwritten history, reaching back for thousands of ages, ended.... Their strange destinies fulfilled, in an instant they disappeared, and all we have of them besides their material relics is the glance caught in their hasty flight, which gives us a few customs and traditions, and a little mythological history.”

Simultaneously with the advance of the Americans westward, the districts now collectively known as British America were being rapidly opened up by enterprising explorers of various nationalities; but, to avoid any further break in the continuity of our narrative, we will reserve our account of the Hudson’s Bay and other companies who took part in the great work in the North for a future chapter. We will follow first the fortunes of the earliest heroes sent forth by the United States Government to survey the regions west of the Mississippi, which, when purchased, were as little known as the heart of Africa before the journeys of Livingstone, Butler, Speke, Grant, Baker, Stanley, and others.

Illustration: THE UPPER MISSOURI.