tory, but descended the river in their bark canoes and fought their enemies with varying success and ever-increasing ferocity. The Illini confederacy claimed the territory on the east bank of the Mississippi, and lived in friendly intercourse with the villagers in the little settlement on the site of the city of St. Louis. Their enemies coveted this beautiful country for winter hunting - grounds, and determined to win it with their battle-axes.

The Sacs and Foxes owned no allegiance other than to the English, and made constant predatory, and sometimes murderous, incursions upon the white Americans and their allies, the friendly Indians. The killing of Pontiac, the Sauke chief, was the ostensible cause of their hostility; but it was pretty satisfactorily established that the intrigues of the English were a more powerful incentive.

On Corpus Christi day, May 6, 1779, one thousand two hundred Canadians, reinforced by detachments of Ojibeways, Menomonees, Winnebagoes, Sioux, Sacs, and Foxes, commenced the attack upon the little walled town of St. Louis. The day had been observed always as a holiday, and the citizens were expected to be out looking for wild strawberries; but, fortunately, warned by the rumors of a contemplated attack, only a few had gone to inspect their crops.

Some hostile Indians had been seen lying in ambush, which alarmed the inhabitants, and they insisted on the Governor calling upon the authorities at St. Genevieve for assistance. He at last yielded unwillingly to their demands, and had, on May 1, 1779, returned with sixty men, who were in the town when the attack was made.

It was sudden and violent, and about twenty citizens were killed in the field before they could regain the fort. Sylvio Francisco de Cartabana, the Spanish Governor, had gone to St. Genevieve and brought the militia from that post to aid in the defence of the town. When the attack commenced neither Cartabana nor his promised force were forthcoming, but lay hidden in a garret until the foe had retired; but the citizens stationed fifteen men at each gate and scattered the rest of their force along the line. They answered the irregular fire of the Indians by grape-shot from their few artillery guns, the intrenchments were formidable, and the cannon, to which they were not accustomed, completed the discomfiture of the attacking Indians. The Lieutenant-Governor, from illness, was not able to walk down to the front of the Governor's house to superintend the spiking of the cannon that defended the approaches. to the little town, but ordered a suspension

of hostilities, and when those engaged in defending the gates, not having heard his order, did not obey, he had a cannon fired at them which tore down a part of their wall of defence. He had previously, under the pretext of a trade proper to be made in a time of profound peace, sold all the powder and ammunition of the garrison to the Indians.

Fortunately, in a private house, eight barrels of powder were discovered, and the citizens levied upon it, in the name of the king, for their defence. Colonel John Rogers Clarke, hearing of their peril, marched from Kaskaskia with a small force to the defence of the whites, but did not cross the river, as the Governor declined their services; but the Indians retreated. It was believed by the citizens that the Governors had been bribed by the British, who did not want any settlement there, lest it should revert to America, and become a stronghold against invasion by them.

The Illini, or Illinois Confederacy, consisted of five tribes-the Kaskaskias, Cahokies, Peorians, Temorias, and Michiganians—and were numbered by the Jesuits, in 1745, at four thousand. The victorious attacks upon them by the Sacs and Kickapoos, to revenge the death of their chief Pontiac, as well as to obtain a more southern country and greater

facilities for hunting, finally reduced this warlike people to a few mendicant stragglers, and thus barbarism and natural forces combined to aid the early settlers to drive the Indians not only out of their possessions, but out of existence.

Environed by superior numbers on all sides, but inured to hardship and danger, the pioneers pressed forward, their feet red with the blood of both whites and Indians, and acquired acre by acre the lovely country east of the Mississippi.

The American Fur Company had their principal post at Mackinac, with outposts scattered at different points on and near the Upper Mississippi. This advance-guard of civilization became wealthy, but took their lives in their hands, and it was an even chance whether they came out with the peltries of animals with which to decorate the potentates and beauties of the old world, or left their scalps to accentuate the figures of a warrior's dance, and their bodies to feed the wild beasts. What these frontiersmen endured is, fortunately, not to be estimated by us from our vantage-ground of peace and security.

The atrocities of the Indians had rendered the whites regardless of their rights or their sufferings. Spoliation by the whites had inflamed the Indians to the greatest degree, and

they turned for vengeance on their oppres

sors.

At last the conflict became incessant because indecisive, and after many bloody engagements, treaties signed and broken as soon as ratified, followed by massacres of the most cruel character, in which every imaginable atrocity was inflicted by the Indians upon their unhappy captives, General William Henry Harrison* was directed by President Jefferson to make a treaty with the Sacs and Foxes, which was ratified in November, 1804, by which the United States bought the territory beginning on the Missouri River, thence in a direct line to the River Jeffreon, thirty miles from its mouth down to the Mississippi, thence up the Mississippi to the mouth of the Quisconsin, and up that river for thirtysix miles in a direct line, thence by a direct line to where the Fox River leaves the Saukegan, thence down the Fox River to the Illinois, of which it is a tributary, and down the Illinois to the Mississippi.

This magnificent body of land, which gave free passage across the country to the Mis

*The same in whose honor I had in childhood seen many dough log-cabins baked and carried in procession, flanked by barrels of hard cider, to barbecues in the groves about Natchez, where rousing Whig speeches electrified "the party." It was in praise of him, too, that the little children piped "For Tippecanoe, and Tyler too," as they ran after the cortège.