Kendall County, Illinois - Chapter 3: Explorations of Lasalle, 1877

Chapter 3: Explorations of Lasalle

T THAT time Robert Lasalle, an educated and talented young man, skilled in the Indian dialects, was residing at Kingston, Canada, then Ft. Frontenac, having obtained a large grant there from the French government. ^<Kp His fields were fertile ; his herds multiplied. His hunters roamed the forests after furs, and his mechanics built canoes and vessels, while under his shelter the missions flourished, his countrymen settled, and groups of friendly Iroquois built their cabins. Fortune was within his grasp. But Joliet, as he descended from the upper lakes, passing the forts, had told the story of his discoveries, and Lasalle was at once fired with plans of commerce between Europe and the Mississippi. Going to France, he unfolded his vast schemes, obtained his commission, returned with the necessary men, Tonti, an Italian veteran, as his lieutenant, launched a ship of ten tons at Niagara, and about Sept. 1, 1769, shipped back his first ship load of furs from Green Bay. He never heard of this ship again ; she was probably wrecked. Weary of waiting for her return, he determined to the Kankakee to its mouth, above Morris. Descending the Illinois river, he reached the Indian town visited by Marquette, near the mouth of the Vermillion, but the tribe was absent in the chase. Farther down, where the river widens into Lake Peoria, Indians appeared, and still farther down he built a fort, calling it, in his grief, the Broken Heart, and afterwards set off on foot, with three companions, for Kingston, leaving orders with Tonti to fortify the Great Rock, now Starved Rock. This he did the following spring. But LaSalle had enemies in Canada, who were jealous of him on account of the authority and trading monopoly granted him by the government, and as soon as they knew^ he had returned to Kingston for supplies, they stirred up the Iroquois and persuaded a large party of them to go to Illinois and destroy his forts. The Indians came by canoe around the lakes, and in September, 1680, descended the Illinois river and invested Starved Rock. Tonti was not prepared for a siege, and, after a parley, was allowed to escape with the few men left him, for many had deserted, and took refuge with the Pottawatomies at Chicago, who appear to have displaced the Miamas about this time. Then began the famous persecution by the Iroquois of the Illinois Indians, who were friendly to LaSalle. At least at this time it first comes into history. The Iroquois had long traded with the whites, and were well armed, and the others, living so far in the wilderness, were beaten again and again and consumed everywhere with horrid butchery. Only traditions and imperfect accounts have come down to us, giving but gleams of the truth - but those gleams are tongues that tell uniformly the same pitiless tale.

Tonti And His Men

TONTI AND HIS MEN mav have remained some time with the friendlv Pottawatomies, and scoured with them the prairies of Kendall County - drank of its springs and camped in its groves. But it is most probable that he preferred wintering on the other side of the lake St. Joe, and, if so, there the intrepid LaSalle found him the next spring, having returned from Canada with men and stores for another little ship or barge. They built it at Green Bay, during the summer, launched it in the spring of 1682, and with another cargo of furs, the party again descended the Illinois. They doubtless gazed long and earnestly at the deserted Rock Fort, as they floated past, but kept on to the Mississippi, and completed the exploration of the river to its mouth. LaSalle then formally took possession of the entire country in the name of France, calling it Louisiana. The news was gloriously received at the French court. It was the beginning of what, it was confidently believed, Avould be a vast and wealthy empire, making France the mightiest nation on earth. And that piece of tall sandstone, now known as was the centre of those ambitious hopes - so far as the great West was concerned, for it was for years the only important military station in the West, besides Mackinaw, and was far the stronger of the two. Lasalle returned there from his Mississippi exploration, cut away the forest trees from the top of the rock, built houses, stretched palisades across the isthmus, and gathered at the base as many of the friendly Illinois tribes - TamaroaSj Kaskaskias, Cohokies, Michigans, Peorias, &c. - as he could find. It was a lively place for the time. He either wintered there, or leaving Tonti in command, went on to Green Bay. In either case, the territory of Kendall county was too near not to be traversed again and again by the French garrison and their Indian allies in search of game, and the coveted furs, for the sake of which the post was largely maintained. Wolves and raccoons were shot in our groves, beavers trapped along our streams, and the lordly buftalo chased over our prairies and brought to the ground by Indian arrows or French flint-locks. The following year Lasalle's monopoly expired, and he returned to France to have it renewed, leaving the faithful Tonti in command at the fort. He never saw Illinois again. In the meantime the missions were continued at the Rock and Kaskaskia. The last is the oldest European settlement in the Mississippi valley, and Illinois is consequently the oldest of all the interior States. Among the missionaries was Allouez, one of the two who visited Illinois eleven years before.

Lasalle was expected back in the summer of 1684, and in the early spring Tonti sent a letter by trusty messengers to await him at the mouth of the Mississippi. But he came not, and the messengers left the letter at an Indian village, with directions to deliver it to the white ships when they arrived. They were faithful to their trust, and fifteen years afterwards delivered the letter to D'Iberville, who entered the mouth of the great river with a Canadian colony.

had the hardest life. Marest wrote : " Our life is passed in roaming through thick woods, in clambering over hills, in paddling the canoe across lakes and rivers, to catch a poor savage who flies from us, and whom we can tame neither by teaching nor by caresses."

He thus describes a journey from the rock to the Peorias : ''I departed, being accompanied by only three savages, who might abandon me from levity, or from fear of enemies might fly. The horror of these vast uninhabited forest regions, where, in twelve days, not a soul was met, almost took away all my courage. Here was a journey where there was no village, no bridge, no ferry, no boat, no house, no beaten path, and over boundless prairies, intersected by rivulets and rivers, through forests and thickets filled with briers and thorns, through marshes where we plunged sometimes to the girdle. At night repose was sought on the grass or on leaves, exposed to the wind and rain, happy if by the side of some rivulet of which a draught might quench thirst. A meal was prepared from such game as'was killed on the way, or by roasting ears of corn."

This is from Marest's letters published a quarter of a century later, at Paris, but applies equally to the state of things in Tonti's day. In the spring of 1687, the Italian lieutenant having heard through Canada that Lasalle with four ships and a large colony had sailed from France for the Mississippi, and unable to bear his suspense any longer, went down with a single companion in search of him. Finding no success, he built a log cabin on an island near the mouth of the Arkansas river, erected a large cross to attract the attention of passing boats, and resolved to spend the season there, in hope of obtaining some trace of his master. It soon came. July 24th, six men and an Indian guide appeared on the Arkansas side of the river, and proved to be a remnant of Lasalles party. The first question was : "Where is Lasalle?" ''^JDead!'' On arriving three years before he had missed the mouth of the Mississippi, spent two years on the coast of Texas after the wreck of the one ship left him, and started with sixteen men to reach Canada, eighteen hundred miles through the wilderness. On the way he was shot by two of his men and left to be devoured by wolves on the Texas prairie, on one of the lower branches of the Trinity river.

So perished one who by his adventures is linked to Northern Illinois, and who for true genius, vast conceptions, force of will, energy of purpose and unfaltering hope, had no superior among his countrymen. It is no sorrow to us to know that his murderers were themselves murdered while quarreling over the spoil. The survivors obtained a guide who piloted them to the Indian town on the Arkansas, nearly the very spot where Tonti was awaiting him. In a few days they took their sad journey up the river to the Illinois Rock, where, so far as we know, Tonti remained in command during the following eighteen years.