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SEARCH FOR THE PACIFIC.

PAGE

The Western Sea.--Schemes for reaching it.--Journey of Charlevoix.--The Sioux Mission.--Varennes de la V?rendrye: his Enterprise; his Disasters; visits the Mandans; his Sons; their Search for the Western Sea; their Adventures.--The Snake Indians.--A Great War-party.--The Rocky Mountains.--A Panic.--Return of the Brothers; their Wrongs and their Fate 3

THE CHAIN OF POSTS.

Opposing Claims.--Attitude of the Rival Nations.--America a French Continent.--England a Usurper.--French Demands.-- Magnanimous Proposals.--Warlike Preparation.--Niagara.-- Oswego.--Crown Point.--The Passes of the West secured 44

A MAD SCHEME.

War of the Austrian Succession.--The French seize Canseau and attack Annapolis.--Plan of Reprisal.--William Vaughan.-- Governor Shirley: he advises an Attack on Louisbourg.--The Assembly refuses, but at last consents.--Preparation.-- William Pepperrell.--George Whitefield.--Parson Moody.--The Soldiers.--The Provincial Navy.--Commodore Warren.--Shirley as an Amateur Soldier.--The Fleet sails 59

LOUISBOURG BESIEGED.

Seth Pomeroy.--The Voyage.--Canseau.--Unexpected Succors.-- Delays.--Louisbourg.--The Landing.--The Grand Battery taken.--French Cannon turned on the Town.--Weakness of Duchambon.--Sufferings of the Besiegers: their Hardihood; their Irregular Proceedings.--Joseph Sherburn.--Amateur Gunnery.--Camp Frolics.--Sectarian Zeal.--Perplexities of Pepperrell 90

LOUISBOURG TAKEN.

A Rash Resolution.--The Island Battery.--The Volunteers.--The Attack.--The Repulse.--Capture of the "Vigilant."--A Sortie.--Skirmishes.--Despondency of the French.--English Camp threatened.--Pepperrell and Warren.--Warren's Plan.--Preparation for a General Attack.--Flag of Truce.--Capitulation.--State of the Fortress.--Parson Moody.--Soldiers dissatisfied.--Disorders.--Army and Navy.--Rejoicings.--England repays Provincial Outlays 117

DUC D'ANVILLE.

Louisbourg after the Conquest.--Mutiny.--Pestilence.--Stephen Williams: his Diary.--Scheme of Conquering Canada.--Newcastle's Promises.--Alarm in Canada.--Promises broken.--Plan against Crown Point.--Startling News.--D'Anville's Fleet.--Louisbourg to be avenged.--Disasters of D'Anville.--Storm.--Pestilence.-- Famine.--Death of D'Anville.--Suicide of the Vice-Admiral.-- Ruinous Failure.--Return Voyage.--Defeat of La Jonqui?re 145

ACADIAN CONFLICTS.

Efforts of France.--Apathy of Newcastle.--Dilemma of Acadians: their Character.--Danger of the Province.--Plans of Shirley.--Acadian Priests.--Political Agitators.--Noble's Expedition.--Ramesay at Beaubassin.--Noble at Grand-Pr?.--A Winter March.--Defeat and Death of Noble.--Grand-Pr? reoccupied by the English.--Threats of Ramesay against the Acadians.--The British Ministry will not protect them 169

WAR AND POLITICS.

Governor and Assembly.--Saratoga destroyed.--William Johnson.-- Border Ravages.--Upper Ashuelot.--French "Military Movements."-- Number Four.--Niverville's Attack.--Phineas Stevens.--The French repulsed 205

FORT MASSACHUSETTS.

Frontier Defence.--Northfield and its Minister.--Military Criticisms of Rev. Benjamin Doolittle.--Rigaud de Vaudreuil: his Great War-party; he attacks Fort Massachusetts.--Sergeant Hawks and his Garrison.--A Gallant Defence.--Capitulation.-- Humanity of the French.--Ravages.--Return to Crown Point.-- Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle 230

A. France claims all North America except the Spanish Colonies 257

B. French Views of the Siege of Louisbourg 274

C. Shirley's Relations with the Acadians 312

INDEX 361

A HALF-CENTURY OF CONFLICT.

SEARCH FOR THE PACIFIC.

The Regent approved the scheme so far as to order the preliminary step to be taken by establishing the three posts, and in this same year, Lieutenant La Noue, of the colony troops, began the work by building a stockade at the mouth of the Kaministiguia. Little more was done in furtherance of the exploration till three years later, when the celebrated Jesuit, Charlevoix, was ordered by the Duke of Orl?ans to repair to America and gain all possible information concerning the Western Sea and the way to it.

Believing that these stories were not without foundation, Charlevoix reported two plans as likely to lead to the coveted discovery. One was to ascend the Missouri, "the source of which is certainly not far from the sea, as all the Indians I have met have unanimously assured me;" and the other was to establish a mission among the Sioux, from whom, after thoroughly learning their language, the missionaries could, as he thinks, gain all the desired information.

The Regent approved the plan of the mission; but the hostile disposition of the Sioux and the Outagamies prevented its execution for several years. In 1727 the scheme was revived, and the colonial 6 minister at Versailles ordered the governor of Canada to send two missionaries to the Sioux. But the mission required money, and the King would not give it. Hence the usual expedient was adopted. A company was formed, and invested with a monopoly of the Sioux fur-trade, on condition of building a fort, mission-house, and chapel, and keeping an armed force to guard them. It was specially provided that none but pious and virtuous persons were to be allowed to join the Company, "in order," says the document, "to attract the benediction of God upon them and their business." The prospects of the Company were thought good, and the governor himself was one of the shareholders. While the mission was given the most conspicuous place in the enterprise, its objects were rather secular than spiritual,--to attach the Sioux to the French interest by the double ties of religion and trade, and utilize their supposed knowledge to reach the Pacific.

Worse enemies than the floods soon found them out. These were the irrepressible Outagamies, who rose against the intruding French and incited the Sioux to join them. There was no profit for the Company, and no safety for its agents. The stockholders became discouraged, and would not support the enterprise. The fort was abandoned, till in 1731 a new arrangement was made, followed by another attempt. For a time 8 a prosperous trade was carried on; but, as commonly happened in such cases, the adventurers seem to have thought more of utilizing their monopoly than of fulfilling the terms on which they had received it. The wild Sioux of the plains, instead of being converted and turned into Frenchmen, proved such dangerous neighbors that, in 1737, Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, who then commanded the post, found himself forced to abandon it. The enterprise had failed in both its aims. The Western Sea was still a mystery, and the Sioux were not friends, but enemies. Legardeur de Saint-Pierre recommended that they should be destroyed,--benevolent advice easy to give, and impossible to execute.

In 1728, he was in command of a small post on Lake Nipigon, north of Lake Superior. Here an Indian chief from the river Kaministiguia told him of a certain great lake which discharged itself by a river flowing westward. The Indian further declared that he had descended this river till he reached water that ebbed and flowed, and, terrified by the strange phenomenon, had turned back, though not till he had heard of a great salt lake, bordered with many villages. Other Indians confirmed and improved the story. "These people," said La V?rendrye to the Jesuit Degonnor, "are great liars, but now and then they tell the 10 truth." It seemed to him likely that their stories of a western river flowing to a western sea were not totally groundless, and that the true way to the Pacific was not, as had been supposed, through the country of the Sioux, but farther northward, through that of the Cristineaux and Assiniboins, or, in other words, through the region now called Manitoba. In this view he was sustained by his friend Degonnor, who had just returned from the ill-starred Sioux mission.

La V?rendrye, fired with the zeal of discovery, offered to search for the Western Sea if the King would give him one hundred men and supply canoes, arms, and provisions. But, as was usual in such cases, the King would give nothing; and though the governor, Beauharnois, did all in his power to promote the enterprise, the burden and the risk were left to the adventurer himself. La V?rendrye was authorized to find a way to the Pacific at his own expense, in consideration of a monopoly of the fur-trade in the regions north and west of Lake Superior. This vast and remote country was held by tribes who were doubtful friends of the French, and perpetual enemies of each other. The risks of the trade were as great as its possible profits, and, to reap these, vast outlays must first be made: forts must be built, manned, provisioned, 11 and stocked with goods brought through two thousand miles of difficult and perilous wilderness. There were other dangers, more insidious, and perhaps greater. The exclusive privileges granted to La V?rendrye would inevitably rouse the intensest jealousy of the Canadian merchants, and they would spare no effort to ruin him. Intrigue and calumny would be busy in his absence. If, as was likely, his patron, Beauharnois, should be recalled, the new governor might be turned against him, his privileges might be suddenly revoked, the forts he had built passed over to his rivals, and all his outlays turned to their profit, as had happened to La Salle on the recall of his patron, Frontenac. On the other hand, the country was full of the choicest furs, which the Indians had hitherto carried to the English at Hudson Bay, but which the proposed trading-posts would secure to the French. La V?rendrye's enemies pretended that he thought of nothing but beaver-skins, and slighted the discovery which he had bound himself to undertake; but his conduct proves that he was true to his engagements, and that ambition to gain honorable distinction in the service of the King had a large place among the motives that impelled him.

As his own resources were of the smallest, he took a number of associates on conditions most unfavorable to himself. Among them they raised money enough to begin the enterprise, and on the eighth of June, 1731, La V?rendrye and three of his sons, together with his 12 nephew, La Jemeraye, the Jesuit Messager, and a party of Canadians, set out from Montreal. It was late in August before they reached the great portage of Lake Superior, which led across the height of land separating the waters of that lake from those flowing to Lake Winnipeg. The way was long and difficult. The men, who had perhaps been tampered with, mutinied, and refused to go farther. Some of them, with much ado, consented at last to proceed, and, under the lead of La Jemeraye, made their way by an intricate and broken chain of lakes and streams to Rainy Lake, where they built a fort and called it Fort St. Pierre. La V?rendrye was forced to winter with the rest of the party at the river Kaministiguia, not far from the great portage. Here months were lost, during which a crew of useless mutineers had to be fed and paid; and it was not till the next June that he could get them again into motion towards Lake Winnipeg.

This ominous beginning was followed by a train of disasters. His associates abandoned him; the merchants on whom he depended for supplies would not send them, and he found himself, in his own words, "destitute of everything." His nephew, La Jemeraye, died. The Jesuit Auneau, bent on returning to Michilimackinac, set out with La V?rendrye's eldest son and a party of twenty Canadians. A few days later, they were all found on an island in the Lake of the Woods, 13 murdered and mangled by the Sioux. The Assiniboins and Cristineaux, mortal foes of that fierce people, offered to join the French and avenge the butchery; but a war with the Sioux would have ruined La V?rendrye's plans of discovery, and exposed to torture and death the French traders in their country. Therefore he restrained himself and declined the proffered aid, at the risk of incurring the contempt of those who offered it.

Beauharnois twice appealed to the court to give La V?rendrye some little aid, urging that he was at the end of his resources, and that a grant of thirty thousand francs, or six thousand dollars, would enable him to find a way to the Pacific. All help was refused, but La V?rendrye was told that he might let out his forts to other traders, and so raise means to pursue the discovery.

In 1740 he went for the third time to Montreal, where, instead of aid, he found a lawsuit. "In spite," he says, "of the derangement of my affairs, the envy and jealousy of various persons impelled them to write letters to the court insinuating that I thought of nothing but making my fortune. If more than forty thousand livres of debt which I have on my shoulders are an advantage, then I can flatter myself that I am very rich. In all my misfortunes, I have the consolation of seeing that M. de Beauharnois enters into my views, recognizes the 14 uprightness of my intentions, and does me justice in spite of opposition."

Meanwhile, under all his difficulties, he had explored a vast region hitherto unknown, diverted a great and lucrative fur-trade from the English at Hudson Bay, and secured possession of it by six fortified posts,--Fort St. Pierre, on Rainy Lake; Fort St. Charles, on the Lake of the Woods; Fort Maurepas, at the mouth of the river Winnipeg; Fort Bourbon, on the eastern side of Lake Winnipeg; Fort La Reine, on the Assiniboin; Fort Dauphin, on Lake Manitoba. Besides these he built another post, called Fort Rouge, on the site of the city of Winnipeg; and, some time after, another, at the mouth of the river Poskoiac, or Saskatchewan, neither of which, however, was long occupied. These various forts were only stockade works flanked with blockhouses; but the difficulty of building and maintaining them in this remote wilderness was incalculable.

He had inquired on all sides for the Pacific. The Assiniboins could 15 tell him nothing. Nor could any information be expected from them, since their relatives and mortal enemies, the Sioux, barred their way to the West. The Cristineaux were equally ignorant; but they supplied the place of knowledge by invention, and drew maps, some of which seem to have been made with no other intention than that of amusing themselves by imposing on the inquirer. They also declared that some of their number had gone down a river called White River, or River of the West, where they found a plant that shed drops like blood, and saw serpents of prodigious size. They said further that on the lower part of this river were walled towns, where dwelt white men who had knives, hatchets, and cloth, but no firearms.

The Mandans seem to have much declined in numbers during the century that followed this visit of La V?rendrye. He says that they had six villages on or near the Missouri, of which the one seen by him was the smallest, though he thinks that it contained a hundred and thirty houses. As each of these large structures held a number of families, the population must have been considerable. Yet when Prince Maximilian visited the Mandans in 1833, he found only two villages, containing jointly two hundred and forty warriors and a total population of about a thousand souls. Without having seen the statements of La V?rendrye, he speaks of the population as greatly reduced by wars and the small-pox,--a disease which a few years later nearly exterminated the tribe.

La V?rendrye represents the six villages as surrounded with ditches 18 and stockades, flanked by a sort of bastion,--defences which, he says, had nothing savage in their construction. In later times the fortifications were of a much ruder kind, though Maximilian represents them as having pointed salients to serve as bastions. La V?rendrye mentions some peculiar customs of the Mandans which answer exactly to those described by more recent observers.

He had intended to winter with the tribe; but the loss of the presents and the interpreter made it useless to stay, and, leaving two men in the village to learn the language, he began his return to Fort La Reine. "I was very ill," he writes, "but hoped to get better on the way. The reverse was the case, for it was the depth of winter. It would be impossible to suffer more than I did. It seemed that nothing but death could release us from such miseries." He reached Fort La Reine on the eleventh of February, 1739.

His iron constitution seems to have been severely shaken; but he had sons worthy of their father. The two men left among the Mandans appeared at Fort La Reine in September. They reported that they had been well treated, and that their hosts had parted from them with regret. They also declared that at the end of spring several Indian 19 tribes, all well supplied with horses, had come, as was their yearly custom, to the Mandan villages to barter embroidered buffalo hides and other skins for corn and beans; that they had encamped, to the number of two hundred lodges, on the farther side of the Missouri, and that among them was a band said to have come from a distant country towards the sunset, where there were white men who lived in houses built of bricks and stones.

On hearing this story, La V?rendrye sent his eldest son, Pierre, to pursue the discovery with two men, ordering him to hire guides among the Mandans and make his way to the Western Sea. But no guides were to be found, and in the next summer the young man returned from his bootless errand.

Undaunted by this failure, Pierre set out again in the next spring, 1742, with his younger brother, the Chevalier de la V?rendrye. Accompanied only by two Canadians, they left Fort La Reine on the twenty-ninth of April, and following, no doubt, the route of the Assiniboin and Mouse River, reached the chief village of the Mandans in about three weeks.

Here they found themselves the welcome guests of this singularly interesting tribe, ruined by the small-pox nearly half a century ago, but preserved to memory by the skilful pencil of the artist Charles Bodmer, and the brush of the painter George Catlin, both of whom saw them at a time when they were little changed in habits and manners since the visit of the brothers La V?rendrye.

Thus, though the report of the two brothers is too concise and brief, 21 we know what they saw when they entered the central area, or public square, of the village. Around stood the Mandan lodges, looking like round flattened hillocks of earth, forty or fifty feet wide. On examination they proved to be framed of strong posts and poles, covered with a thick matting of intertwined willow-branches, over which was laid a bed of well-compacted clay or earth two or three feet thick. This heavy roof was supported by strong interior posts. The open place which the dwellings enclosed served for games, dances, and the ghastly religious or magical ceremonies practised by the tribe. Among the other structures was the sacred "medicine lodge," distinguished by three or four tall poles planted before it, each surmounted by an effigy looking much like a scarecrow, and meant as an offering to the spirits.

Every day had its sports to relieve the monotony of savage existence, the game of the stick and the rolling ring, the archery practice of boys, horse-racing on the neighboring prairie, and incessant games of chance; while every evening, in contrast to these gayeties, the long, dismal wail of women rose from the adjacent cemetery, where the dead of the village, sewn fast in buffalo hides, lay on scaffolds above the reach of wolves.

The Mandans did not know the way to the Pacific, but they told the brothers that they expected a speedy visit from a tribe or band called Horse Indians, who could guide them thither. It is impossible to identify this people with any certainty. The two travellers waited for them in vain till after midsummer, and then, as the season 23 was too far advanced for longer delay, they hired two Mandans to conduct them to their customary haunts.

They set out on horseback, their scanty baggage and their stock of presents being no doubt carried by pack-animals. Their general course was west-southwest, with the Black Hills at a distance on their left, and the upper Missouri on their right. The country was a rolling prairie, well covered for the most part with grass, and watered by small alkaline streams creeping towards the Missouri with an opaque, whitish current. Except along the watercourses, there was little or no wood. "I noticed," says the Chevalier de la V?rendrye, "earths of different colors, blue, green, red, or black, white as chalk, or yellowish like ochre." This was probably in the "bad lands" of the Little Missouri, where these colored earths form a conspicuous feature in the bare and barren bluffs, carved into fantastic shapes by the storms.

For twenty days the travellers saw no human being, so scanty was the population of these plains. Game, however, was abundant. Deer sprang from the tall, reedy grass of the river bottoms; buffalo tramped by 24 in ponderous columns, or dotted the swells of the distant prairie with their grazing thousands; antelope approached, with the curiosity of their species, to gaze at the passing horsemen, then fled like the wind; and as they neared the broken uplands towards the Yellowstone, they saw troops of elk and flocks of mountain-sheep. Sometimes, for miles together, the dry plain was studded thick with the earthen mounds that marked the burrows of the curious marmots, called prairie-dogs, from their squeaking bark. Wolves, white and gray, howled about the camp at night, and their cousin, the coyote, seated in the dusk of evening upright on the grass, with nose turned to the sky, saluted them with a complication of yelpings, as if a score of petulant voices were pouring together from the throat of one small beast.

On the eleventh of August, after a march of about three weeks, the brothers reached a hill, or group of hills, apparently west of the Little Missouri, and perhaps a part of the Powder River Range. It was here that they hoped to find the Horse Indians, but nobody was to be seen. Arming themselves with patience, they built a hut, made fires to attract by the smoke any Indians roaming near, and went every day to the tops of the hills to reconnoitre. At length, on the fourteenth of September, they descried a spire of smoke on the distant prairie.

One of their Mandan guides had left them and gone back to his village. The other, with one of the Frenchmen, went towards the smoke, and 25 found a camp of Indians, whom the journal calls Les Beaux Hommes, and who were probably Crows, or Apsaroka, a tribe remarkable for stature and symmetry, who long claimed that region as their own. They treated the visitors well, and sent for the other Frenchmen to come to their lodges, where they were received with great rejoicing. The remaining Mandan, however, became frightened,--for the Beaux Hommes were enemies of his tribe,--and he soon followed his companion on his solitary march homeward.

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