With the help of industrious nursing, or, one might almost say, in spite of it, Louisiana began at last to strike roots into the soil and show signs of growth, though feebly as compared with its sturdy rivals along the Atlantic seaboard, which had cost their King nothing, and had been treated, for the most part, with the coolest neglect. Cavelier de la Salle's dream of planting a firm settlement at the mouth of the Mississippi, and utilizing, by means of it, the resources of the vast interior, was, after half a century, in some measure realized. New France (using that name in its broadest geographical sense) had now two heads, -Canada and Louisiana; one looking upon the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the other upon the Gulf of Mexico. Canada was not without jealousy of her younger and weaker sister, lest she might draw away, as she had begun to do at the first, some of the most active and adventurous elements of the Canadian population; lest she might prove a competitor in the fur-trade; and lest she should encroach on the Illinois and other western domains, which the elder and stronger sister claimed as her own. These fears were not unfounded; yet the vital interests of the two French colonies were the same, and each needed the help of the other in the prime and all-essential task of keeping the British colonies in check. The chiefs of Louisiana looked forward to a time when the great southern tribes, - Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and even the dreaded Chickasaws, won over by French missionaries to the 1730-1750.] PLAN OF CANADIAN CHIEFS. 325 Church, and therefore to France, should be turned against the encroaching English to stop their westward progress and force them back to the borders of the Atlantic. Meanwhile the chiefs of Canada were maturing the plan — pursued with varying assiduity, but always kept in view of connecting the two vital extremities of New France by a chain of forts to control the passes of the West, keep communications open, and set English invasion at defiance. CHAPTER XIV. 1700-1732. THE OUTAGAMIE WAR. - THE WESTERN POSTS. - DETROIT. THE ILLINOIS. · PERILS OF THE WEST. THE OUTAGAMIES.—THEIR TURBULENCE.-ENGLISH INSTIGATION. - LOUVIGNY'S EXPEDITION. - DEFEAT OF OUTAGAMIES. HOSTILITIES RENEWED. - LIGNERY'S EXPEDI-OUTAGAMIES ATTACKED BY VILLIERS; BY HURONS AND IROQUOIS. LA BUTTE DES MORTS. THE SACS AND FOXES. TION. THE rulers of Canada labored without ceasing in their perplexing task of engrossing the fur-trade of the West and controlling the western tribes to the exclusion of the English. Every day made it clearer that to these ends the western wilderness must be held by forts and trading-posts; and this policy of extension prevailed more and more, in spite of the league of merchants, who wished to draw the furtrade to Montreal, in spite of the Jesuits, who felt that their influence over the remoter tribes would be compromised by the presence among them of officers, soldiers, and traders; and in spite of the King himself, who feared that the diffusion of the colony would breed disorder and insubordination. Detroit, the most important of the western posts, struggled through a critical infancy in the charge of 1700-1722.] THE ILLINOIS. 327 its founder, La Mothe-Cadillac, till, by a choice not very judicious, he was made governor of Louisiana. During his rule the population had slowly increased to about two hundred souls; but after he left the place it diminished to a point that seemed to threaten the feeble post with extinction. About 1722 it revived again; voyageurs and discharged soldiers settled about the fort, and the parish register shows six or eight births in the course of the year.1 Meanwhile, on the banks of the Mississippi another settlement was growing up which did not owe its birth to official patronage, and yet was destined to become the most noteworthy offspring of Canada in the West. It was known to the French as "the Illinois," from the name of the group of tribes belonging to that region. La Salle had occupied the banks of the river Illinois in 1682; but the curious Indian colony which he gathered about his fort on the rock of St. Louis 2 dispersed after his death, till few or none were left except the Kaskaskias, a sub-tribe of the Illinois. These still lived in the meadow below Fort St. Louis, where the Jesuits Marquette, Allouez, Rale, Gravier, and Marest labored in turn for their conversion, till, in 1700, they or some of them followed Marest to the Mississippi and set up their wigwams where the town of Kaskaskia now stands, near the mouth of the little river which bears the same name. Charlevoix, who was here in 1721, calls this 1 Rameau, Notes historiques sur la Colonie Canadienne du Detroit. 2 See "La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West," ii. 59. the oldest settlement of the Illinois,1- though there is some reason to believe that the village of Cahokia, established as a mission by the Jesuit Pinet, sixty miles or more above Kaskaskia, and nearly opposite the present city of St. Louis, is, by a few weeks, the elder of the two. The voyageurs, coureurs de bois, and other roving Canadians made these young settlements their resort, took to wife converted squaws, 2 and ended with making the Illinois their home. The missions turned to parishes, the missionaries to curés, and the wigwams to those compact little Canadian houses that cause one to marvel at the ingenuity which can store so multitudinous a progeny within such narrow limits. White women from Canada or Louisiana began to find their way to these wilderness settlements, which with every generation grew more French and less Indian. The river Mississippi was at once their friend and their enemy. It carried their produce to New Orleans, but undermined their rich alluvial shores, cut away fields and meadows, and swept them in its turbid eddies thirteen hundred miles southward, as a contribution to the mud-banks of the delta. When the Mississippi Company came into power, the Illinois, hitherto a dependency of Canada, was 1 "Ce poste, le premier de tous par droit d'antiquité.” — Journal historique, 403 (ed. 1744). 2 The old parish registers of Kaskaskia are full of records of these mixed marriages. See Edward G. Mason, Illinois in the Eighteenth Century. |