Daviess County, Indiana - Chapter with an unread heading (no. 1 of those read), 1886

Chapter with an unread heading (no. 1 of those read)

Colonial History of Vincenxks from 1608 to 1702 - The Miamis and Oth kr Tribes - Chippecoke - Savage Stoicism - The Canadian Voyageurs - Colonies Established by Religious Enthusiasts - The Indian Fur Trade - The Regiment Caeignan-Salieres - Colonial Government - Tin; "Xew Village."

AT about the period of the advent of the Europeans on the North American Continent, a division of the Algonquin race of savages left their country, bordering upon the waters of the Bay of Puans (Green Bay), and wandering south and eastward, acquired a permanent lodgment at isolated stations along the River St. Jerome (Wabash), from the Scioto to the Mississippi. Early in their migration they encountered the indomitable missionary and the alert trader from the French settlements upon the St. Lawrence. From these they learned to speak the salutation prescribed by the early code of the forest - "Mon ami" (my friend) - and whether, as claimed by a painstaking writer, f out of these French words was carved their family name

Series," - Records of St. Francis Xavier i allied rai," "Clark's ' ampai.'n," Holler's "History of Keniucky," "Political History of Michigan," Western .Sun (sketches), 1S04 to 184.5, " Acis of Congress."

- Miami - or not, they were, of all the Western nations, the most faithful in their relations with their white neighbors. Although these ceremonious greetings have been obsolete for a century, and the dusky race of " friends" has disappeared with the vast forests in which it was cradled, rivers and hills and municipal divisions perpetuate in their names this meeting of races in the wilderness of America.

At the junction of the rivers St. Joseph and St. Mary's, the site of the present city of Fort Wayne, stood Ke-ki-on-ga, the chief Miami village ; seven miles below the modern city of Lafayette, Ouitenon, and "two hundred leagues farther down by the windings of the current, on the -left bank of the St. Jerome, surrounded by good lands for beaver," Chip-pe-coke (Brushwood), the Indian predecessor of Vincennes. Lodges and less important villages, inhabited by Weas, Mascoutins, Pottawattomies, Puans, Piankashaws, etc., "all speaking dialects of the same language, having the same customs and ceremonies as the Miamis - all Miamis," in many lines, extended from these principal towns eastward to Lake Erie, and southwest to the Ohio. Relics rescued from shell-heaps, and the evident disposition of the dead revealed in exhumations, indicate that earlier than this possession by the Miamis the site of the village of Chip-pe-coke had been, for many years, the home of a people practicing the ceremonies and observing the customs peculiar to the Mandans, who, also, were wanderers from the sea-coasts of North Carolina.

The Shawanees

Between the time of the Mandans and the Miamis, the Shawanees had adopted this favorite spot for a temporary home. One of the rambles of the latter tribe, occurring since the establishment of English colonies in America, serves to delineate the unstable life, the aimless shiftings, exterminations, and overlappings of one population upon another, out of which, doubtless, arose the deadly feuds under which, in bloody and relentless wars, as the curtain rose to reveal to the European the red man of the woods, their mimbers were even then melting away with such rapidity that, had the white man delayed his advent but a few centuries longer, he would have found an unpeopled wilderness to welcome him. At a treaty with Penn, near Philadelphia, the Shawanees were present, and conceded to be owners of portions of the soil upon the Delaware. Soon afterward they appear to have gone to the South, as guests of the Cherokees, where, fomenting strife, they were expelled the country, and took up their abode near the Chickasaws. Next they found a more permanent home at the confluence of the Wabash and Ohio (Shawaneetown), from whence, over their old hunting grounds, they passed up the Wabash to southern Michigan.

Chippecoke, Indian Customs

The size of fields devoted to sepulture, the condition of remains exhumed in early excavations, almost uniformly well preserved, and the large number of interments, indicate that while the Indian town of Chip-pe-coke was the center of a dense population, its occupancy by the Miamis had not extended, perhaps, over half a century of time when first visited by the white man. The customs of the Miamis so fully preserved by the whites, who so constantly maintained an intercourse with them, the suggestive character of individual names, and monuments of boundaries, preserved to us in ancient grants, enable us to, partially at least, reproduce this village of the savages as it was at the time when there came to it from the North that population of Old World origin the recital of whose history is to depict the dawn of civilization in Indiana. In person the Miamis were tall, lithe and well formed, regular featured, of a bright bronze complexion, in some cases, from family admixtures, however, darkening into the shade of the Nubians.* They were vain in dress, fond of ornaments, and lavish in the display of curious medicine pouches, charms, talismans and amulets. Eminently social in the lodge, mirthful around the camp-fire and loquacious in council, the brave, in the presence of his enemies, under the agony of torture, could remain as taciturn and unyielding as stone. Upon the war-path he spared not even the babe clinging to its mother's breast; deprived of the society of his own offspring he wasted to death with grief. The mother who toiled in the fields singing the while her affection for the child slung to her back, looked upon its brutal murder by the foe with unmoistened eyes, suffering no sigh to escape from her agonized breast, over which her tribal enemy might gloat. An incident related by a Jesuit father, who writes as an eye-witness, will well serve to illustrate how vain of the ability to exhibit brutal indifference to their own physical suffering the Indian was. The Father relates that while a religious procession at the feast of Corpus Christi was passing along the Rue Calvary, two wounded Indians just from some brawl, were observed in the street. One, bleeding from the face and neck, was moaning piteously ; the other, with a gash in his abdomen from which protruded his entrails, sat quiet until the religionists arrived opposite him, when he exclaimed: "See how a brave man dies," opened still wider his wound and cut piece after piece from his exposed viscera. The Miami was especially fond of festivals and dances; some. of his feasts, notably that of the "green corn," were celebrated with games and contests as exciting and honorable as those immortalized at Olympus. Upon occasion of these holidays, tales of adventure, recitals of legends, narratives of a mythological character, tribal traditions and humorous pantomimes, occupied the time between game and dance, contest and banquet, and never lacked an appreciative and delighted audience. His love of adventure was unsurpassed by any appetite except his passion for gambling. The first, with a love of gossip seemingly never satiated, sent him upou long solitary jaunts from village to village of his nation; the latter often detaining him upon the war path until his vengeance cooled. Their habitations were constructed of bark and boughs, and one often sheltered at the same time three and four generations. The coming into existence of a new family was provided for by extending the roof of the wife's parents a few feet and kindling a new domestic fire. Upon the eastern bank of the Wabash, at an elevation some twenty feet above the immediate plain stretching to the east, from near Broadway Street to Perry, amid a few barren, stunted oaks, about thirty such lodges, containing in- all over 100 families, dominated at the northern limit by a large, circular structure designated as the council -house, were grouped to form the village where the first white settlement in Indiana was effected. It was under the totem (a family badge) of the turtle, and as such ranked equal, in Indian caste, with the larger capital Ke-ki-on-ga; possessing the right, in the Miami confederacy, to be consulted before engagements in war, and with the prized though ignominious right to share in the cannibal feasts of the tribe.

First Canadian Residents

Although, in the journeys often made before the close of the sixteenth century, by explorers, missionaries and traders from Quebec, Montreal and Three Rivers to Kaskaskia upon the Mississippi, the Wabash was used as a highway, and, as this Indian village was the most important for so many leagues of the route, it was, doubtless, well known to such travelers, yet no trace of the presence of the French earlier than the beginning of the seventeenth century can be found. It was in the early autumn of 1702 when four Canadian boats, containing eight white men, convoyed by a flotilla of Indian laden canoes, gathered from the various villages along the route, having accomplished their long journey by water and portage from the castle of St. Louis at Quebec, were stranded in front of the council-house upon the site of the present city of Vincennes. The names of but four of these voyagers have been preserved. They were Juchereau, the commander; Leonardy, his lieutenant; Goddare and Turpin, couriers des bois - travelers of the woods - the surf of the flowing tide of population, ever preceding the wave, slowly intruding upon the realm of solitude and the savage. Impulses having their origin across the ocean, events transpiring in colonies upon the St. Lawrence, had molded their characters, and at last ordained them to become truly light-bearers in a heathen wilderness. France planted a colony at Quebec in 1608. "For the glory of the crown, for the dominion of Christ's holy church," this colony soon came under the patronage of the State and the especial solicitude of the pope. Before Talon, before Guise or Lorain, this union of interest, and yet separation of duties, had been well expressed at the conclusion of a quarrel in the Canadian woods: "You show me my way to heaven," said the governorgeneral to the vicar, "and I will show you your path on earth."

Religious Enthusiasts

which had produced the reformation in the neighboring kingdoms of Germany and England; and enthusiasts offering themselves for martyrdom, devotees, counting sufferings experienced in propagating the true faith as earnests of jewels to be worn in their crowns in heaven, offered themselves in flocks to carry out schemes of the utmost madness. In the province of Anjou, at the town La Fh'che, lived Jerome de la Danversiere, an officer of the Income, an enthusiastic devotee, of mystical tendencies, who whipped himself with scourges of chains to mortify the flesh, and wore a belt with more than 1,200 sharp points, that he might be reminded how much better it is to suffer finitely in this world than infinitely in the world to come; truly, a type of many such filling all France with pious sighs and groans, and aspiring to martyrs' crowns under the impatient belief that the world would soon become too pious to offer them. One day, while at his devotions, he heard an inward voice, commanding him to become the founder of a new order of nuns, and establish under its conduct a hospital iipon an island called Montreal, in Canada, In the old church of St. Germain des Pre"s, a priest, Jean Jacques Olier, founder of the famous seminary of St. Sulspice, kneeling while the choir was chanting the words Lumen ad revelationem Gentium, heard a voice from heaven commission him to be a light to the Gentiles. An inward voice at the same hour told Olier that he was to form a society of priests, and establish them upon the island of Montreal in a Canadian river. Danversiere proceeded to Paris immediately after his experience at La Flcche, and there in the church of Notre Dame, in the ecstacy of a trance, was led by the hand of the blessed Virgin to the presence of her glorious Son, who accepted the devotee as a servant. Thus confirmed in his miraculous call, he visited the old castle at Muedon, where in its galleries he met Olier, and, although until then unknown to each other, they immediately embraced and saluted each other by name. "Monsieur-," exclaimed the priest, "I know your design, and I go to commend it to God at the altar."

Mademoiselle Jeanne Mance, while not of the cloister, had lived from a tender age the life of a nun, and under a vow of perpetual chastity. Inflamed with the Canadian enthusiasm so prev- alent, and desiring to emulate the fame of Madame de la Peltrie, of whom she had read so much, she determined to offer herself to the work in Canada. Setting out upon her journey, she proceeded to Eochelle to take ship. On the day of her arrival at this port she repaired to the Church of the Jesuits, and as she entered its doors she met Danversiere. " Then," says Faillon, her biographer, "these two persons, who had never seen nor heard of each other, were enlightened superuaturally, whereby their most hidden thoughts were mutually made known." She had found her destiny. The ocean, the wilderness, the solitude, the Iroquois - nothing daunted her.* Out of these visions, in 1643, there arose upon the island of Montreal a seminary consecrated to Christ, a Hotel Dieu to St. Joseph and a college to the Virgin. This colony, fed with illusions, founded in dreams, the subject of prayers in unbroken vigils (a nun remained at the altar day and night praying for its preservation), under deceptive lights and false shadows, in the very realm of miracles, beset, in the diseased imagination of its members, with devils and guarded by angels, with less blood, with less waste of human life, carried the light of the gospel of Christ farther into the desert, to more souls than any of all who came to civilize the human tiger in his American home.

The Fur Trade

With all the religious fervor, so strangely impelling men and women to leave refinement and luxury, and enter upon lives of deprivation and solitude, there went out to Canada the worldly motive of gain. The fur trade at Montreal, as well as at Quebec, was accepted as the chief end and aim of colonial enterprise. Every one, from the governor down, was suspected, and probably justly, with having a part in it; and the struggle between the monopolies and the irregular traders provided voluminous charges and counter charges, freighting every ship returning to France. The church revenues were increased by it, its privileges were bestowed as- charities to widows and orphans, and sold profitably for their benefit. The result was that the country swarmed with couriers des bois, who were the indispensable agents of all who engaged in the traffic. But Louis XIV awoke to a new ambi- tion. He had expanded into a great king, and, determined that Canada should not be abandoned to a company of merchants, announced to his ministry that a new France should be added to the old. Under this new policy, in 1G65, the royal patron sent out soldiers, settlers, horses, sheep and cattle, and young women for wives.

The First French Soldiers

The old regiment of Carignan-Salieres was the first regiment of regular troops ever sent to America by the French government. As out of its roll of officers there came Francis Morgan de Vinsenne", from whom the city of Vincennes derived its name, the history of this corps will not be without interest. It was raised in Savoy by the Prince of Carignan, in 1644, and was soon employed in the service of France on the side of the king, at the battle of Porte St. Antoine, in the wars of the Fronde. After the peace of the Pyrenees, the Prince, unable longer to support the regiment, gave it to the king, whereupon it was incorporated into the French armies. In 10t>4 it distinguished itself as part of the allied force of France in the Austrian war against the Turks. The next year, incorporated, it was consolidated with the fragment of a regiment formed of Germans, the whole placed under the command of Col. de Salie"res and ordered to America. Fifteen heretics were discovered in its ranks and quickly converted. Mother Mary, of the Incarnation, an Ursuline superioress, undertook to enlist them as new crusaders, and soon "made fully five hundred take the scapulary of the Holy Virgin."* Thus equipped and instructed, each soldier became more than an arm of the king - he was an apostle.

Government Of The Colony

The fatherly care of the king sought to do still more for his colony. He wished to form a Canadian noblesse, and to this end stimulated marriages among officers and others of the better sort by royal bounties. This care went farther. Bounties were offered on children. By decree of council it was ordered "that all inhabitants of the said country of Canada who shall have living children, to the number of ten, born in lawful wedlock, not being priests, monks or nuns, shall each be paid out of the moneys sent by his majesty to the said country a pension of 300 livres a year, and those who shall have twelve children a pension of 400 livres."* Still another Canadian policy is worthy of review. The better protection of Montreal from the incursions of the savage Iroquois, led to a division of the lands along the Richelieu from its mouth to a point above Chambly into large seigniorial grants, which were apportioned among several officers of the regiment of Carignan, who, in their turn, granted out the land to the soldiers. The officer thus became a kind of feudal chief, and the whole settlement a permanent military cantonment. The seignior, in a few cases, made grants of the soil which he had received gratuitously from the crown to other seigniors inferior in the feudal scale, and tbey granted in turn to their vassals, the habitants or cultivators of the soil.f The seignior held by the tenure of faith and homage, the habitant by the inferior tenure en censive. The office of commander carried with it, at all such cantonments, more than seigniorial powers over the ungranted adjacent territory; it conferred upon the officer the right to grant in the name of the crown in perpetuam the fee, to those desiring to become settlers, to small places for homesteads, and to allot to all such in common sufficient fields for tillage, and others likewise in common for pasturage. ' These grants once made, and settlements so established, over all, regulating contracts, tenures, inheritances, heirships and successions, was a vague civil code called the Contume de Paris. As seignior of the lands acquired, often from evacuation by the Indians, more frequently by grants for favor, the military officer in command exercised judicial powers, from whose decrees, in grave matters, there was, however, an appeal to the commune, the whole of the adult male population of the district as a jury. And even still beyond, to the governor of the Province, the litigant might carry his grievance. J

In strict feudalism, land ownership conferred nobility; but this was changed in Canada. Tbe king and not the soil was the parent of honor. So to provide a nobility, a gentry, for his beloved colony, Louis honored the officers of the regiment Carignan, many of whom were of the gentilhomme of old France, and others selected from time to time, with titles. Wherever the colonist settled beyond the borders, whatever had lured him to the interior, business of the crown, hope of gain in the fur trade, zeal for the propagation of the faith, it was as impossible for him to divest himself of any one of these impulses, and to rid himself of the influence of these laws and customs, as to suddenly forget his beloved language.

The Sieure Juchereau was from the Cote La Salle on the St. Lawrence, a regular trader bearing a permit to establish a trade upon the river St. Jerome. Not even the faintest trace of his companions beyond naming three of them, except that Leonardy was in command at the Posie de Oubache, preceding Vinsenne, can now be found.

The Indians, soon after the arrival of the whites, conceded ground for the "new village upon the bank of the stream from the lower line of their village (Broadway Street) to the low lands."* " The fort," probably a palisade, formed of stakes planted in the earth leaning outward, enclosing a log magazine buried in the sand; a storehouse constructed potteau en terre (posts in the ground) with the interstices filled with mortar toughened by the long prairie grass, and a few rude sheds, or huts of bark, soon arose into the nucleus, around which has gathered all of our modern city, and at whose gates armed contests between nations have adjusted boundaries, created States, and determined the political institutions of mighty races and populations.