The English Colonies.

55

There was a missionary station here in 1699, where the gospel was dispensed to the Miamis. There appears also to have been a French village here at that time, as St. Cosme speaks of a lost boy at the time of his passing through the place, and several Frenchmen turning out to hunt for him among the tall grasses. After thirteen days, the boy returned to the village, spent with hunger and fatigue, and almost insensible.+

While these events, so auspicious to the French in the interim, were passing, the English colonists were at work within a very circumscribed compass, along the eastern fringe of the continent. The Massachusetts colony was composed of Puritans after the Cotton Mather pattern.

The Connecticut and the New Hampshire colonies were also fashioned after the same model.

The Rhode Island colony was modified somewhat by the liberalism of Roger Williams, Wheelright, Vane, and Anne Hutchinson.

The Germans along the Hudson river were not unlike this same thrifty people of our day.

On the Delaware were the Swedes and Fins, models of frugality and piety.

In Pennsylvania were the English Quakers, under the leadership of the broad-gauge brain of William Penn.

In Virginia was the true type of English chivalry.

The Puritans may justly be called the conscience of the nation, and the Virginians, with equal propriety, the sword of the nation. In the Carolinas were Huguenots and Quakers, and in Georgia respectable Englishmen, not conspicuous for any tangent points of character, except the ambitious aims indispensable to American emigrants.

No confederation or bond of union existed between these different colonies, but the exploits of the French in the West were rapidly hastening an issue bound to unite them together in a bond of union which was the outgrowth of the French and Indian war.

While this issue is maturing, Chicago must slumber in obscurity.

* Early Voyages, p. 50, published by Joel Munsel, Albany.

Early Voyages, pp. 56-8.

CHAPTER IV.

First Passage through the Detroit River-A Stone Statue found there-English on the Upper Lakes-Settlement of DetroitThe Foxes Attack the Place-Mission of Father Marquette at Michilimackinac-Cahokia and Kaskaskia Settled Ft. Chartres- Vincennes Settled-Comparison of the English with the French Colonies-The Paris Convention to Establish the Line between the English and French in AmericaConvention at Albany-The Ohio Company-The French Build Forts on French Creek-Gov. Dinwiddie sends Washington to Warn them out of the Country-The Ohio Company send Trent to Build a Fort where Pittsburgh now standsHe is driven away by the French- Washington sent to the Frontier-He Attacks the French-Retreats-Builds Ft. Necessity-The Fort taken by the French.

Detroit stands foremost among the cities of the Northwest in local historic interest, although the place was unknown to the French even for some years after Lake Superior had been explored to its western extremity and missions established along its southern waters.

The Ottawa river of Canada, Lake Nippising, and the northern waters of Lake Huron, were the channels by which the great West was first reached by the French, and nearly the only ones used till La Salle had secured Lakes Ontario and Erie as a highway from Canada to the West, as told in the previous chap

ter.

In the autumn of 1669, at the Indian village of Ganastogue, at the western extremity of Lake Ontario, two distinguished explorers, La Salle and Joliet, met by chance. Joliet was on his return from a trip to the Upper Lake, as Lake Superior was then called, for the purpose of discovering the copper mines. In reaching this place from Lake Superior, he must have passed down the river, then without a name, now called Detroit river, and first called by the French "The Detroit" (The Straits). It is a matter of record that an old Indian village, called Teuchsa Grondie, stood originally there, but no mention is made of it by Juliet.

Discovery of Detroit.

57

The next spring, 1670, two priests, Galinee and Dablon, on their way from Canada to the mission of Sainte Marie, which had been established at the Sault the previous year, landed at or near the present site of Detroit. The first object of interest they beheld was a barbarous piece of stone sculpture in the human form. This was quite sufficient to unbalance the equilibrium of the two fathers, whose zeal had been whetted into an extravagant pitch by the hardships they had encountered on their way. With pious indignation they fell upon the "impious device" with their hatchets, broke it in pieces, and hurled the fragments into the river.*

The place would have been brought to light long before but for the Iroquois, who guarded the passage of the lower lakes with bull-dog tenacity, to preserve their own nation and protect their fur trade.+

That a fort was built at Detroit between this time and 1687 is inferred from Tonty's Memoir, in which. while on the way down. the lakes, he says: "The Sieur de la Forest was already gone with a canoe and thirty Frenchmen, and he was to wait for me at Detroit till the end of May." Farther along he continues: "We came, on the 19th of May (1687), to Ft. Detroit. We made some canoes of elm, and I sent one of them to Ft. St. Joseph."

During the few years which succeeded Frontenac's recall from the governor's chair of Canada, La Barre and next Denonville supplied his place. Both of their administrations were ushered in with promises of great results, but terminated in utter failures. They had measured their strength against the Iroquois, who proved too much for them, both in the forum and in the field.

Thos. Dongan was then colonial governor of New York, whose vigorous and ambitious policy, assisted by the Iroquois, contemplated the establishment of a trading post at Michilimackinac, for the mutual interests of both, and, in 1687, English agents started up the lakes for that purpose, under protection of the Iroquois and Foxes.

The latter held supreme sway on those waters at that time, and were more friendly to the English than the French, as the

Jesuit Relations, 1670.

Father Paul Raguneau, in the Jesuit Relations of 1650, uses the following language:

[Translation.] "All the Algonquin nations who dwell to the west of the ancient country of the Hurons, and where the faith has not yet been able to find its way, are people for whom we cannot have enough compassion. If it be necessary that the name of God be adored, and the cross be planted there, it shall be done in spite of all the rage of hell and the cruelty of the Iroquois, who are worse than the demons of hell."-Pages 30 and 31.

See Hist. Coll. of Lou., vol. 1, p. 69.

Paris Doc. III., published in Doc. Hist. N. Y., vol. 1, p. 229.

French had, by some misdirection, made enemies of them at their first interview.

After Tonty with his men had left Detroit, as just told in his Memoir, as he was continuing his course along the lake shore toward Canada, he fell in company with Durantaye and Du Lhut, with their commands.

They had in their custody thirty English prisoners, whom they had just captured on the shore of Lake Huron.

Farther along in the Memoir, Tonty states that he took thirty more English prisoners, who were on their way to Michilimackinac, under command of Major Gregory-that they had with them several Huron and Ottawa captives, who had been taken by the Iroquois and consigned to their charge-that they also had a "great quantity of brandy" with them, which Tonty congratulated himself for having taken, inasmuch as it would have (in his own words) "gained over our allies, and thus we should have all the savages and the English upon us at once."

A war was going on at this time between the Iroquois and the French, of which the English probably took advantage to attempt to gain a foothold on the upper lakes.

Before the war was ended, all Canada was overrun by the Iroquois, Montreal burned, and two hundred persons captured and taken into the wilderness lodges of their conquerors in the present State of New York.

They were treated so kindly, however, that more than half of them refused to return to their home in Montreal after peace had been made, even though the French king commanded them to

return.

The following September, 1689, commissioners from the New York and New England colonies met the Iroquois deputies at Albany in convention, when one of the chiefs congratulated the English colonists that their chain of friendship was strengthened by their burning of Montreal.

Frontenac was now restored to power in Canada, and under his vigorous administration the Iroquois were obliged to evacuate the French provinces, and the war was transferred to the territory of the English colonists, by the burning of Schenectady and the slaughter of its inhabitants. The original plan of this expedition was to capture Albany, the headquarters from which the English had fitted out their expedition to Michilimackinac,* but on their way they were informed that there was too large a force there for them to encounter, and they attacked Schenectady instead.

Had the English scheme to establish a post at Michilimackinac proved a success, the limits of New France would have been

*Paris Doc. IV.

Settlement of Detroit.

59

confined to the present limits of Canada, and the whole western country have been opened immediately to English colonization, which must have hastened its settlement at least a generation. But the whole plan miscarried, if not on account of Tonty's seizure of the brandy, at least owing to the great distance of the post from the English settlements and to the allied action of the French and western tribes against the Foxes, whose immediate protection was necessary to the English cause on the upper lakes.

This English attempt to gain a foothold in the West doubtless. stimulated the French to hasten to completion their own designs to accomplish the same purpose.* To this end a council was called at Montreal a few years later, to which the Canadian and western tribes were invited, nor were their ancient enemies the Iroquois forgotten.

The latter now disclaimed any intention to allow either the French or English to erect forts on the upper waters, but the western tribes favored the plan, of course. Meantime the French had already made preparations to establish a post on the Detroit. Antoine de la Motte Cadillac, Lord of Bouaget and Mountdesert, was on the spot, with a commission from Louis XIV., as commandant of Detroit. He started from Montreal in June, 1701, with one hundred men and all the necessary appliances, both religious and secular, to form a colony, and the next month safely landed, tented upon the spot, built Ft. Pontchartrain, and and commenced the settlement of the place.

The settlement was a permanent one, although for many years it was often reduced to the verge of ruin. The aimless character of the settlers was the chief cause of this, but there were other hindrances in the way of progress. The Iroquois looked with jealous eyes upon them, but not more so than did the English settlements along the Hudson; and three years after the settlement of Detroit, an Indian convention of the tribes bordering on the lakes was summoned to meet at Albany.†

Here the brains of those vacillating French allies, particularly the Ottawas, were temporarily turned over to the English interest, and on their return they set fire to the town, but the flames were soon extinguished.

A second attempt to burn the place, while it was under command of Tonty, met with no better success. Meantime Cadillac succeeded in getting some Indians from Michilimackinac and other places, whose friendship was of a more abiding character, to form a settlement near by, who acted as a sort of picket guard about the place.

These consisted of Ottawas, whose village was on the river,

*Lanman's Mich., p. 40.

+ Cass' Discourse.