THE OHIO VALLEY-GREAT LAKES ETHNOHISTORY ARCHIVES: THE MIAMI COLLECTION
It is noted that the following work from the Miami Archives should be read and considered within the historical context in which it was composed and printed. The opinions expressed and the language used do not reflect the opinions or standards of the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, but are, rather, indicative of thought in that historical moment during which the document was published.
(Due to length divided here into 3 parts)
de La Salle or Father Membré, In:
English Translation of Margry, vol. 1, pp. 472-586.
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(page 542). . .In order to explain all these matters, we must go back a little.
When the Sieur de La Salle left the Illinois' country, there remained with the Sieur de Tonty only fifteen persons, namely, two Recollet Fathers, the Sieur de Boisrondet, three ships' carpenters, one smith, two joiners, two sawyers, whom he had trained at Crevecoeur, and four soldiers. The Sieur de La Salle promised to send him reinforcements in place of the four Frenchmen he took away. And he did, in fact, as soon as he arrived at Niagara, send off the Sieur d'Autray, a young man both brave and prudent, the son of the first Procureur General of Quebec, with four men in two canoes laden with arms and ammunition and all that was required for finishing his barque. He directed him to take with him the men Messier, Hunaut and Crevel, whom he was to find on the way, and two other men whom he had sent to Missilimakinak from the outfall of Lake Huron into Lake Erie, as stated above. From Fort Frontenac he sent the Sieur de la Forest with four or five men. At the same time he sent word to the Sieur de Tonty of the advance of the Iroquois, and advised him to withdraw from their line of march and not to espouse the cause either of one side or of the other; for it was not right to violate the laws of hospitality by making war upon the Illinois who had received them so well, nor yet to take sides against the Iroquois lest he should provoke war against Canada.
These reinforcements would have sufficed to enable him to keep the fort safe and also the barque which had been begun, and to defend him even against the Iroquois; but the desertion of his best men rendered all these precautionary measures useless. (page 543) The deserters, having stolen the goods and ammunition, and demolished the fort of Crevecoeur and the fort of the Miamis, met the party whom the Sieur de La Salle was sending to the Illinois country, and disheartened them by a thousand falsehoods. Finally they told them, that the Sieur de Tonty was dead and testified to it in such a manner that the Sieur de La Salle's men dared not go any further, and even the Sieur de la Forest, allowing himself to be convinced and believing that his journey would be useless, also retraced his steps. Thus the Sieur de Tonty was left among the Illinois with Father Gabriel de la Ribourde, a man of great merit and exemplary virtue, who was 63 years of age; Father Zénobe Membré, a most excellent and wise monk; the Sieur de Boisrondet, a young man, loyal and dauntless; and two other young Frenchmen, all so destitute of ammunition that they had only three shots apiece to fire.
A rumour was also circulated among the Illinois that the Sieur de La Salle was dead, and that news was confirmed there some time after. Nevertheless, the Sieur de Tonty never lost heart, and bore with patience his state of destitution. He sent, by two different routes, to warn the Sieur de La Salle of all that was going on; and he acted with so much discretion and determination in the perilous conjunctures in which he found himself involved very soon after, that he acquired very great influence with the Indians.
While these things were happening, the Iroquois were marching against the Illinois. The former dwell to the south of Lake Frontenac, and are divided into five subdivisions, namely, those of the Agnié, who live near New York, the Onneiout, the Oiogouen, the Onnontagué and the Sonnontouan, the most powerful of all. They (page 544) agree perfectly among themselves, but they are almost always at variance with the other tribes. They are cunning, crafty, treacherous, vindictive and cruel to their enemies, whom they burn by a slow fire, with incredible tortures and barbarities. Although there are only about 2,500 warriors amongst them, as they are the best armed and the most accustomed to war in all North America they have carried their arms in all directions, 800 leagues round, that is, towards the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, to the northern seas into Florida, and even beyond the Mississippi. They have destroyed more than thirty tribes, and in the last eighty years have put to death more than 600,000 souls, and have left the greater part of the countries round the great lakes uninhabited. It is they alone who have for a long time prevented the growth of the colonies of Canada; and it was with great difficulty that they were forced to make peace and are compelled to keep it.
Since the defeat of the Gandastoguez, a tribe which used to dwell on the frontier of Virginia, whom they entirely destroyed three years ago, they had been seeking employment for their arms. They did not dare to attack the northern tribes, who lived under the protection of the French. Those to the south were either destroyed or had completely submitted. Hence there remained only those to the west, of whom the nearest and most powerful were the Illinois and the Miamis, and these they determined to attack, being convinced that after they had been defeated the others would be incapable of resisting them. However, as these two tribes combined would have been able to defend themselves with success, the Illinois numbering nearly 1800 very (page 545) brave warriors and the Miamis from 1200 to 1500, most of them armed with arrows only, but great runners and very well fitted for effecting surprises, the Iroquois proposed to divide them, in order to defeat them one after the other.
The Miamis used formerly to dwell on the west of the Lake of the Illinois, but fear of the Iroquois made them fly to beyond the River Mississippi, where they settled. Some years ago, the Jesuit Fathers sent them presents to induce them to return to their former dwelling places, and they succeeded in bring away of them who established themselves near the source of the River Teatiki, on which the Sieur de La Salle went down on his first journey, as we have said.
As the Illinois were the more numerous and the braver, the Miamis, who often had quarrels with them, feared them little less than they did the Iroquois; and so they listened to the proposals which the latter made to them, and came to an agreement with them, not thinking of the misfortunes to which they would find themselves exposed after the Illinois had been crushed.
When the Iroquois had made their arrangements in this way, they very soon found a pretext for making war on the Illinois in hunting encounters when they often quarrelled with one another, and fell upon one another unawares. They seized upon the first opportunity of this kind, and began to make raids. After that they made their preparations, and they set out in the month of August in order to arrive at the time when the Indian corn would be ripe so that they might not run the risk of being in want of provisions. They went down by rivers to the south of Lake Erie and arrived among the Illinois on the 18th of September, at which time the Sieur de (page 546) La Salle was at Missilimakinak, and the Sieur de Tonty in the condition set forth above.
He was staying the great village of the Illinois, to which he had withdrawn, after the desertion of his best men, to get food more easily; and he was expecting news of the Sieur de La Salle when suddenly they came and told him that the Iroquois were within two leagues, and their fear was all the greater because the Illinois were not in a condition to withstand them. More than half their warriors had gone in detachments in various directions a long way from their country, in spite of the remonstrances of the Sieur de Tonty who had repeatedly pointed out to them that they ought not to scatter themselfes at a time when they were expecting a pitiless war with the Iroquois. These warriors had taken most of the guns from the village, where there were only a hundred left, with ammunition for three or four hundred shots, and four or five hundred fighting men armed with arrows and tomahawks. The village had no inclosure or intrenchment, and was situated on the north bank of the river along which it extended one league in length and a quarter league broad.
The Iroquois, on the contrary, numbered five Hundred men, well accustomed to war, proud of their victories and armed with guns, pistols and sabres. They all had shields of wood or leather, and some wore a kind of breastplate or cuirass made of wood. A hundred Chaouanons, armed with bows and arrows only, had joined them, to avenge themselves on the Illinois, their enemies, by the assistance of the Iroquois. This little army was encamped on the south side and on the bank of the River Aramoni (*), into which (page 547) it throws itself two leagues below the village.
The Illinois were not dumbfounded at the disparity between their forces and those of their enemies. All night they embarked the old men and the women and children in their pirogues with all their best possessions and a quantity of Indian corn. They gave them fifty or sixty warriors as an escort and sent them six leagues below the village to a place which is almost inaccessible on account of the marshes surrounding it. The rest of the young men passed the night in feasts, songs and dances in order to stimulate themselves, after their manner to attack the Iroquois.
Fresh losses fell upon the Sieur de La Salle through this confusion; for, as the Illinois would not leave any booty for their enemies they carried off, or cast into the river, everything which might be useful to them. Thus the Sieur de La Salle lost all the implements of his smithy, a number of tools, a quantity of old iron and goods which the deserters could not carry, which the Sieur de Tonty had had taken to the village, and lastly beaver skins to the value of more than twenty thousand livres, which belonged to him or had been set aside for him by the Illinois who intended to make him a present of them. The two Recollet Fathers were at that time in a hut one league from the village, to which they had retired as a sort of retreat, and they were not informed of the arrival of the Iroquois until the fighting had begun. The Indian in whose hut they were lodged carried off the box in which their church ornaments were, in order to preserve them, but they got scattered during the flight of the Illinois from whose possession, however, some of them ware afterwards recovered.
(page 548)
At that time the Sieur de Tonty was in great danger of losing his life. It had been rumored, on the first journey of the Sieur de La Salle, that he was in league with the Iroquois; and, although he had undeceived the Illinois, as already stated, yet Nicanape, one of the chiefs of the Cascacia (Kaskaskia) tribe, had since then often asserted to his fellow-tribesmen that some Frenchmen had warned him not to trust the Sieur de La Salle. This rumour was renewed and greatly strengthened by the following incident.
In the morning of the 19th of September a few Illinois were sent to reconnoitre the Iroquois, They found them on the bank of the River Aramoni; and, seeing that Teganeont, a chief of the Iroquois, was wearing a black coat and a hat and stockings of the same colour, they took him for a Jesuit; they came straightway and proclaimed it in the village, adding that the Sieur de La Salle also was there, and that all Frenchmen were traitors. That was quite sufficient to rouse the Indians, who are very hasty by nature, to avenge on the Sieur de Tonty and his companions the wrong which they believed they had suffered from the French; and they would probably have done so if he had not immediately taken the only course possible in this emergency. In order to remove this impression from the minds of the Illinois he offered to march at their head to fight against the Iroquois; this proposal produced on their minds the effect which he had hoped, and all the young men got ready for the fight.
The left bank of the river towards the south is lined by a long rock, very narrow and steep a1most throughout its length except for a stretch of over a league situated opposite the village, where the ground, all covered with fine oaks, stretches (page 549) in a gentle slope down to the banks of the river. Beyond this height is a vast plain extending a very long distance southward, which is crossed by the River Aramoni, whose banks are covered by a narrow fringe of wood. It was to this plain that the Illinois betook themselves very early the same day with the Sieur de Tonty, followed by the Sieur de Boisrondet and another Frenchman, the third being ordered to remain at the village in order to protect the Sieur de La Salle's papers.
They saw the Iroquois all massed together on this side of the wood bordering the River Aramoni, and immediately ran to attack them; but the Sieur de Tonty, who saw that the sides were not equally matched, determined to try and effect some arrangement between these savages. He first stopped the advance of the Illinois by his warnings; and then, leaving his arms with one of the Illinois he went forward, followed by another, towards the Iroquois, with a porcelain necklace in his hand, which is a token of peace among the eastern tribes in the same way as the calumet is among the indians of the west. These porcelain necklaces are nothing more than pieces of shell, pierced and polished in various shapes, which serve as money among several of the tribes.
As, however, the Iroquois continued firing, the Sieur de Tonty sent back the Illinois who was accompanying him and went on alone right up to the Iroquois notwithstanding their continued volleys. He was immediately surrounded by several of these savages; and one of them, who perhaps did not recognize him as a Frenchman, stabbed him with a knife below the left breast, inflicting a deep and dangerous wound. The others placed themselves in front of him, and gave him a draught which immediately (page 550) stopped the bleeding, and dressed the wound. But, while this was going on, one of the Iroquois put the Sieur de Tonty's hat on the end of his gun; and the Sieur de Boisrondet and the Illinois, believing that he was dead, attacked the Iroquois so vigorously that they forced them to give way and retire nearly half a league. In this encounter the Illinois lost one man killed and six wounded and the Iroquois had one man killed and nine wounded. The latter then came and complained to the Sieur de Tonty that the French were fighting on the side of their enemies. He offered to put a stop to the fight; and his proposal being accepted, he went and made the Illinois and the French withdraw. The two forces separated and the Iroquois pretended to be returning to their own country.
The Sieur de Tonty, returning to the village with the Illinois, met Father Zenobe, who was coming to his assistance, having been informed of the fight and his mound. A short time after the Iroquois advanced, under the pretext of looking for provisions; but the Illinois, who easily guessed their intentions, set fire to some huts and retired to the place to which they had sent the women and the old men. The Iroquois burned the rest of the village and employed the wood of the huts to make a rough palisade in which they enclosed themselves to guard against surprise.The Sieur de Tonty and the other Frenchmen remained in their hut which had not been burned until the Iroquois invited them to come into their fort, where they would be safer, and they accepted the offer.
Eight or ten days passed in this way, and during that time the Sieur de Tonty tried to make peace between these two nations; (page 551) and at night both sides went into the fields, gathering Indian corn. Finally the Iroquois, who wished to profit by the weakness of the Illinois brought presents to the Sieur de Tonty to induce him to consent to their destruction; but when he constantly refused them, they advised him to withdraw, lest he and his men should be killed during the fight, either by their young men or by the Illinois.
When the Sieur de Tonty finding that he received no news of the Sieur de La Salle who- he had been told- was dead; that winter was coming on; that he had neither goods, nor provisions, nor ammunition; and that his safety depended upon the mercy of these two savage nations; at last determined to leave. He embarked with the two Recollet Fathers and the other three Frenchmen; and, as he had a quantity of beaver skins, he abandoned some of them and took the rest, intending, If the Sieur de La Salle was dead to buy arms, ammunition and some goods with them, in order to complete this grand exploration.
He went up the River of the Illinois with great difficulty, because he had no good boatmen. On the third day after they left, Father Gabriel landed in order to pray to God more peacefully and refresh himself by walking along the river; but he was discovered by some Indians of the Kikapou tribe, and these savages killed him with arrows without anyone seeing it. The Sieur de Tonty stopped at noon, to wait for him; and, finding that he did not come for a long while, he retraced his steps to seek him. He waited for him again the next day, but all his trouble was in vain, and he was obliged to continue his journey, grieving over the loss of a man who was esteemed by all who knew him.
(page 552)
Shortly after, he reached the place where the River Teatiki, on which the Sieur de La Salle had gone down, which comes from the country of the Miamis, is joined by the River Divine. He went up the latter, without leaving anything to show which way he had gone, thereby making a serious mistake, which caused great trouble to him and to the Sieur de La Salle, as we shall see later on. He reached the Lake of the Illinois in a few days, and embarked upon it, proceeding from south to north along the western shore of the lake. He met with incredible difficulties on this voyage, and, with all his companions, was reduced to the last extremity for want of provisions. At last, however, he got to the district of the Pouteatamis, where he was obliged to winter.
Meanwhile the Iroquois, as soon as the Sieur de Tonty left, vented their rage on the dead bodies of the Illinois, which they disinterred, or threw down from the platforms on which the Illinois leave them exposed for a long time before putting them in the earth. They burned most of them, they even eat some, and cast the rest to the dogs. The heads of these corpses, with flesh half torn off, they fixed upon stakes. They also made havoc in the fields; and in fact neglected nothing which could gratify their desire for vengeance.
They broke up their camp a few days after in order to follow the Illinois, who had taken flight immediately after the departure of the French. Yet they did not dare to attack the Illinois as long as they saw that they were united and resolved to defend themselves; and they contented themselves with desecrating the tombs which they found on their line of march, and encamping always within view of them, with the river between. (page 553) They even tried, with their usual cunning, to persuade the Illinois that they were satisfied and wanted nothing more except the glory of having driven them off the field. The Illinois stood out against their trickery for a long time, and retired in this manner as far as the Great River, always retreating in good order; but at last they allowed themselves to be entrapped by the fine words of the Iroquois.
When the two armies had come near to the outfall of the river, the Illinois, wearied by so long a retreat, and deceived by the assurances which the Iroquois gave them that they would withdraw as soon as they saw that they were no longer keeping together, determined to separate. All these nations are divided into tribes; and so, after this decision had been come to, the Cascasia, who are the bravest of all with the Caokia and the Chinkoa, went up the Great River. The Peoucaria, who are the most numerous tribe, withdrew to the plains beyond the same river. The Omouahoa, the Coiraobitanon, the Moingoana and the Chepousca went down the Great River, and the Maroa or Tamoroa, the Tapouaro and the Ispeminkia, more credulous than any of the other Illinois, remained near the outfall of their river, to hunt in the neighborhood.
The Iroquois, who were only waiting for such an opportunity, attacked the latter; and they, weak both in numbers and in arms, took to flight after a long resistance. But few Illinois were killed, for they are very swift runners, and only three on the side of the Iroquois; but about seven hundred women and children were left exposed to the fury of the latter. They put nearly half of them to death with unheard of barbarities, the melancholy tokens of which the Sieur de La Salle saw twelve days after, and (page 544) they carried off the rest into slavery.
While all these events were taking place, the Sieur de La Salle was at Missilimakinak, where he found great difficulty in obtaining provisions from the Indians. . . ."
. . . He was so often delayed by the wind and the rain that he was not able to reach the mouth of the River of the Miamis until the fourth of (page 555) November. He thought that the Sieur de La Forest would arrive there as soon as he did, because, he was not so hampered with baggage; but, contrary to the orders which he had received, he went to meet the men he was waiting for, but did not meet them,, and did not get back to Missilimakinak until the 4th of November, and the winds prevented him from leaving there until the eleventh of that month.
He then set out on the 8th of November with six Frenchmen and another Indian; and on the 15th he arrived at the village of the Miamis, and found no one there. On the following day he went up as far as the portage, by which you go to the River Teatiki; he saw that the Miamis had encamped there, and he afterwards learned that they had set out from there eight or ten days before, in order to pursue the remnant of the Illinois of whose rout the Iroquois had informed them. On the 17th, he made this portage,- a distance of two leagues when the (page 556) water is low,- and on the 23rd he reached a place called La Fourche des Iroquois, where the Kikapous, who were also on the war-path, had encamped, a short time since on a hill, to the number of two hundred. He went on his way, finding most abundant hunting everywhere, which gave great pleasure to the Sieur de La Salle's men but caused him great anxiety, for he could not think what had prevented the Illinois from setting fire to these plains in the usual manner, to hunt the wild oxen.
"On the 27th, having reached the junction of the River Divine and the River Teatiki, he landed to see whether he could not find any signs of the Sieur de Tonty having passed there, for he could not find any signs of the Sieur de Tonty having passed there, for he could not return except by one of these two rivers; and as he found no trace, because he had neglected to leave any, in the belief that the Sieur de La Salle was dead, he was convinced that he would find him still at the village. So, comforted by that hope, he stopped there for three days, hunting. They killed twelve very fat cows and eight roebucks, besides many turkeys, bustards and swans. As he was only fifteen leagues from the village, where he believed that all was still well, he had all this meat dressed in order to preserve its so that he could send for it for his store during the winter, and he had one canoe loaded with all the best parts with the intention of feasting the Sieur de Tonty and the other Frenchmen upon them on his arrival.
He reached the village on the first day of December and found there nothing but traces of the fire and of the fury of the Iroquois. Nothing was left but the ends of burnt poles, (page 557) showing what the extent of the village had been., and, on most of them the heads of corpses had been fixed, and picked by crows. There were others at the gates of the Iroquois' fort, with a quantity of calcined bones, and a few remains of the utensils and clothes of the French which he could tell, from various indications, had been there for some time. In the fields they saw a number of bodies half eaten by wolves; the tombs destroyed the bones taken out of the graves and scattered over the plain; the holes in which the Illinois hide their belongings when they go hunting all open and their kettles and pots broken. Most of the Indian corn was still standing, and in several places they saw heaps of it half burned. Lastly the wolves and the crows added to the horror of the scene by their howls and croaking. It is easy to understand the consternation of the Sieur de La Salle at this sight. He went all round the fort of the Iroquois and found no mark of gun shots nor of arrows, nor anything to show that the French had been prisoners there. He examined one by one all the heads set up there, and saw by their hair that they were those of women or Indians, whose heads are all very large and very short. It was a most melancholy task; but he was obliged to perform it, notwithstanding, so that he might ascertain what had become of the Sieur de Tonty and his men. At last, going by chance to their garden, which he easily recognized, a league from the village, near the banks of the river, he found six stakes set up there, painted red, with a drawing on each of a black man with his eyes bandaged; and he then thought since it is the custom of the Indians to put up such stakes at the places where they have captured or killed some of their enemies, that the Iroquois had found the six (page 558) Frenchmen by themselves, and had either massacred them or made them slaves. He also observed that the huts in the fort had recently been rebuilt; and that led him to think that the Illinois had entrenched themselves there and had been driven out by the Iroquois who had rebuilt the huts in a different way; but he learned some time after, that it was the work of two hundred Kikapous, who had encamped there a few days before he arrived. He also saw a number of fresh trails of Indians. Nevertheless the cold was so severe that he was compelled to light a great fire and remain in the place with his men, keeping strict watch in turns during the night.
(page 559)
On the following day the 2nd of December, about three o'clock in the afternoon, he embarked with the Sieur d'Autray, the men You and Hunaut and an Indian. Each of them had two guns, a pistol and a sword, bullets, powder, and a few hatchets and knives for presents. He went six leagues before nightfall, and arrived at the place to which the Illinois had first sent the women and children. It was a tongue of land fifteen or twenty aces wide and half a league in length. It was protected by the
*A few words have been omitted here from the text-- such as, 'a tributary of the Mississippi,' or something to that effect.- Translator's note.
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