The pageant of Saint Lusson, Sault Ste. Marie, 1671

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University of California.

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PAGEANT OF SAINT T.rQQOX

an Sltilirrss

nii: ANNUAL COMMENCEMENT OF TUT
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN,

Thursi. >92.

r>v JUSTIN wiNSOi: uj)

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PUBLISH

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THE

PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON,

SAULT STE. MARTH inrt.

DELIVEBED AT

THE ANNUAL COMMENCEMENT OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN,

Thursday, June 30, 1892.

By JUSTIN WINSOR, LL.D.

I.IMRAKIAV OF HARVARD ITNIVERRITY.

.• : -1 '>

ANN ARBOR, MICH. :

PUBLISHED BY THE BOARD OF REGENTS.

1892.

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030

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• • .• .••

• • • « •
' • • •

THE

PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON,

16 71.

T17E will lift the curtain, if you please, on a wild
pageant in the early history of Michigan. The
scene is at the Sault Ste. Marie in 1671. But first,
we must needs understand the conditions which had
brought events to such a pass that a representative
of the French king, just at this time and precisely at
this spot, had found it meet to proclaim the sovereignty
of France over a vast area where France possesses
to-day not a rood of territory.

The discovery of America, and discovery in America
for over three centuries, were the pursuit of a chimera.
The illusion which had brought Columbus across the
forbidding waste of water was the vision of a short
water-way to Cathay. By the time he was ready for
his fourth voyage, it was evident that what had been
found was not the historic land which Marco Polo had
described, with golden-roofed cities and rivers spanned
by a hundred bridges, but islands that offered a bar-

228338

4 THE PAGEAxNT OF SAINT LUSSON.

rier to the real India. Through this obstacle the cov-
eted channel must be found. On his last voyage Co-
lumbus had peeped into every inlet along the shore
of Costa Rica in search of such a passage. Ten years
later, Balboa had seen from the dividing ridge of the
Isthmus the great expanse of the South Sea ; with this
discovery it seemed probable that what we now call
South America was an independent continent. Ma-
gellan after another ten years proved that it was.

Men now asked themselves if there might not be
at the north some compensating passage. The Span-
iards had already tracked the northern shore of the
Gulf of Mexico, and though they had noticed the out-
flow of a great river, there was no lure of gold in
that direction, and they left the secret of the Missis-
sippi to be unfolded by the French from the north a
hundred and fifty years later.

Gradually geographers learned to look wistfully to
the north, where the English under Cabot had been
the first to disclose what proved to be a great gulf.
The Portuguese followed in the track of the English ;
but they did not care to pursue the hidden mysteries
of the coast when they found that for the most part
it lay beyond the papal line of demarcation which sep-
arated their rights from those of Spain. The French
cared for no such rights ; and they knew that for the
fish they could catch there, all Europe offered a mar-
ket for one day in three, on which flesh was forbidden.
To meet this holy demand, the hardy seamen from the

Nornifiii aiul "Breton ports, jind the Basques from the
Bay of Hiscay, iiicrcasud yearly in nuiiihci-s in the
watri- contl^-iKnis to this northern gull", until its won-
ders and allurcnieats had become a familiar slorv in
the mail time towns of France. These adventurous
fishermen hroiiLihi away fnim iliis insular region some
charts, which in a few cases hasc come down to n-.
Tluir hydromaphical surmises gave Cartier tlif iiii cn-
tive to try the hazards of the watery expanse tliat lay
to the west of Newfoundland. As the doughtiest mar-
iner of his day, Cartier could hardly have vaulted
over the rail of any one of these returned fishinL'*
craft in the harbor of St. Malo, where he lived, with-
out havinof his attention called in such maps to the
inviting ])ortals of this western mystery. From the
first voyage of Cartier in 1534, France had before her
nearly a hundred and forty years of trial, before she
was satisfied that she could never reach China by the
valley of the St. Lawrence.

The story of this interval is one of pluck and
hardihood. The adventurer, the trader, and the ])riest
struggled for the Icadj and now it was one, and now
the other, who iixed a trading post or huilt a bark
chapel farther than before on the way to Cathay.
They pushed west by the Ottawa and Lake Nipissing
to Georgian Bay, and yearly the lusty woodsmen led
back to Montreal, d'lnee Rivers, and Quebec, a native
flotilla of fur-laden canoes. They pushed on to Laki;
Superior, and one advent uron> spirit had found his

6 THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON.

way thence by stream and portage to Hudson Bay.
Here he discovered that English ships were drawing
away the Indian traffic in peltries from the French
posts. When on his return this enterprising leader
proposed to the authorities at Quebec an expedition
by sea to wrest this northern vantage-ground from
their English rivals, he got nothing but jeers and
neglect. This treatment sent him to Boston, where he
found better encouragement; and forming a partner-
ship with a Yankee skipper, the two ultimately went
to London and opened the way to the formation of
that great monopoly, the Hudson Bay Company, so
long to push the fur-companies of Canada in hardest
rivalry. To thwart such impending competition was
one of the incentives which sent Saint Lusson and
Perrot to the Sault Ste. Marie at the time we are
considering.

The exploration of the St. Lawrence had begun, as
we have seen, with the hope that it might prove a
convenient path to India. The westward route by the
Ottawa had developed the geography of the upper
parts of Lake Huron. It had shown the diverging
ways by the Straits of Mackinac and by the Sault.
The priest had followed the trader. The Jesuits had
made the circuit of Lake Superior, and had produced
a marvellously accurate map of that water, making it
evident that the way to India could no longer be
searched for in that direction. Thus the limits of dis-
covery thitherward must be emphasized by an act of

THE PAGEANT OF SAIN I LI SSoX. 7

possession, rendered all the more fitting by the fact
that Joliet had but recently opened a new route by
Lake Erie and the St. Clair River, which proved that
large vessels built above the Falls of Niagara could
carry on commerce with the upper lakes.

Ever since the trader Nicolet had pushed up Green
Bay and the Fox River, five and thirty years before,
and had told to the dying Champlain a story of great
waters that he had onlv failed to reach, his surmises
had been undergoing modification under the later re-
ports of Grosseilliers, Allouez, and Marquette, till it
became evident that the Indian stories of vast waters
beyond the lakes did not refer to a great sea, but to
a mighty river. It was no longer doubtful that this
potent stream could be reached by portages of mod-
erate extent from Lake Superior and Green Bay; and
there were suspicions of other transits near the head
of Lake Michigan. As yet no one could say that the
southern shore of Erie would not yield other passages ;
and it is possible that La Salle had already passed to
the Ohio, and had believed it the way to this mag-
nified river. It is certain that the Jesuit missionaries
in western New York had crossed the divide, and had
actually wandered along the northeastern slope of the
great Mississippi valley. At the site of the modern
Ashland, on Lake Superior, Allouc"/ mid Miir(j[uette
had in turn endeavored to interpni ilir nccomits of
the great river which had readied ilicni i'loiii liiii:itive
Huron and wandering Sioux ; but they had ililTt rod

8 THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON.

in their conclusions. One had fancied the inscrutable
river to flow southwest into the Gulf of California ;
and the other hoped in time to follow it to the Sea
of Virginia,. — somewhere on the seaboard of our pres-
ent Southern Atlantic States. Thus it was that this
undeveloped geography towards the south suggested
possible contact with either Spaniard or English. This
gave another reason for the ceremony we are soon to
consider.

Towards the north it was evident the chances of an
outlet to salt water were no better. The Saguenay
had been tried in vain. No one had believed such
an egress possible by the Ottaw^a since the time w^hen
Champlain was deceived by the mendacity of Yignan.
Per^ and Grosseilliers had failed to find a practicable
northern route from Lake Superior.

Such had been the outcome, as has been said, of
nearly a hundred and forty years of persistent effort,
when the vigilant, keen, aspiring mind of the Inten-
dant Talon — the ablest administrator that France
ever sent to Canada — grasped the situation. For
thirty-five years the monitions of Nicolet had waited
for such a fertile mind. It was clear to Talon's con-
ceptions that the great valley of the lakes was sure
to France, through the possession of its natural water-
ways. Nature had rendered easily accessible, by a
system of low dividing ridges, the vast adjacent val-
leys towards the north and the south, and Talon had
the ambition to occupy them. It mattered little to

THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON. 9

him if the English were on Hudson Bay, provided he
could secure the upper waters of its tributaries. It
mattered little to him if the great valley of the Missis-
sippi stretched to Spanish settlements on the Pacific,
or to English colonies on the Atlantic, if he could be
the first to carry the French lilies from its upper
reaches to the sea.

In this frame of mind Talon organized the expedi-
tion whose crowning act may interest us to-day. To
give dignity to the movement he selected a gentleman
to lead it, Daumont de Saint Lusson ; but there was
joined with him the most capable master of woodcraft
in all New France, Nicholas Perrot, an expert talker
in the Indian tongues. He could read as well as talk,
which few of his class could do.

It was in the latter half of 1670 that Saint Lusson
with his little party left Quebec. They wintered at
the Manatoulin islands. Here during the weary weeks
their plans were set in order, so that when the spring
opened, messengers were ready to start for the northern
tribes, bearing invitations to attend in the early sum-
mer at the Sault, for a converse with the whites.
These movements started, Perrot himself set out for
Green Bay. His mission was to ingratiate himself with
the tribes of that region, and to induce them to join
their northern kindred in the great convocation. By
the last of April, 1671, Perrot had assembled his Indian
friends, representing all the tribes of the Green Bay coun-
try, and an immense flotilla of canoes moved onward

2

10 THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON.

towards the Sault. On the 5th of May they reached
their destination, and found that Saint Lusson with his
little party of Frenchmen had already arrived. The
messengers who had been sent to the boreal parts had
done their work, and gradually tribe after tribe came
upon the scene. Not only these, but the opening
summer had brought other tribes, whom the messengers
had not reached, drawn hither to profit by the fishing
season. Scattered around in little colonies of kinship,
the lodges of the savages dotted the ground. The
warriors squatted in groups along the sloping ground,
and passing hither and thither among them w^ent the
welcoming whites, — placeman, priest, and trader, —
losing no occasion to impress upon all, the dignity of
their coming purpose and the masterful sovereignty
of the French king.

There was one among the four or five black robes,
who made part of the attending whites, who was con-
spicuous for his hoary years, — a man now much be-
yond his threescore and ten, but still undaunted at
the hardships of the wilderness. One would like to
take him aside and listen to the thoughts already
suggested to him by the coming ceremonial. Let us
in our imagination sit here beneath this tree, scattering
its scent of early summer, and listen to the story which
we may be permitted to draw from the lips of Gabriel
Dreuillettes.

. A score of years had passed since he was ministering
to the Abenakis among the sources of the Kennebec. At

THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON. 11

that time rumors were constantly reaching him of the
savage inroads which the Iroquois were making along
the St. Lawrence, so that even the shores of Hudson
Bay, whither the fugitive Montagnais had fled, had
not placed these frightened allies of the French beyond
the reach of the implacable confederates. All these
years of crouching suspense throughout Canada were
largely the result of Champlain's reckless provocations
of the Mohawks forty years before ; and the inevitable
dooming of the Hurons followed. The Iroquois fell
upon the Huron villages and relentlessly swept away
savage and Jesuit. In the despair which followed, the
conscious Abenakis felt that their turn would come next;
and the French in Quebec knew not where to look for
succor but to the neighboring New England.

It marks the supineness which settled upon the
Canadians at this time that they sought to enlist the
English assistance, not only by offering reciprocity of
trade, but also by yielding to New England's preten-
sions in respect to territorial bounds. There had been
little of this self-restraint when Dreuillettes had been
first sent to the Abenakis ; for he had been directed not
only to convert them, but to make sure of their friend-
ship in case of outbreak with the English, — at least,
such is the admission of Charlevoix.

Whether the territory of the Abenakis was properly
within the jurisdiction of the French or that of Ply-
mouth, which had chartered rights on the Kennebec,
depended on the limits of Acadia; and this was then

12 THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON.

and for a long time afterwards, in dispute between
the two Crowns.

All such rival claims were for the instant forgotten
when the governor in Quebec drew up a proposal for
alliance, and pressed the right of the Abenakis to Eng-
lish protection, on the ground that they were really
the wards of the Plymouth colony. With such an
argument outlined by his superior, Dreuillettes was
ordered to leave his catechumens and make his way
to Boston. Descending the Kennebec, and coming to
the trading-post which the Plymouth people maintained
there, near the site of the modern Augusta, the priest
encountered the hearty, whole-souled commander of
the post, a man of good English gentry blood, John
Winslow, and representing the authority of that colony.
Dreuillettes laid his purpose before him. Winslow, if
we may believe the Jesuit's own narrative, was eager
to help on an alliance ; and the two men made the most
of the promptings of that good fellowship sprung from
a jovial intercourse which neither was loath to share.
Down the Kennebec they went, and by water along the
coast, till they found it best to seek the shore and travel
by land. It was a drear December evening when the
companions were rowed across to the northern point
of the Boston peninsula.

Here the priest was received with the consideration
due to his ambassadorial character. The Puritan stat-
utes that placed a Jesuit beyond the pale of protection
were put in abeyance. A notable merchant of the

THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON. 13

town — a man who came as near being a godless cos-
mopolitan as the Puritan habits would permit —
opened his house to the priest and gave him a key
to a chamber where he could undisturbed arrange his
holy vessels and say his masses.

The next day Dreuillettes was conducted by Winslow
to Governor Dudley. Stern Puritan as the chief magis-
trate was, he had in his younger days fought under
Henry of Navarre. Dreuillettes thought the sound of
the Gallic tongue might warm the governor to some-
thing more than stately courtesy; but the grim sur-
roundings had little in accord with the sunny France of
the Puritan's youth, and the magistrate insisted upon
the ungracious intervention of an interpreter.

So weighty a question as was propounded, the am-
bassador was made to understand, must be referred to
the consideration of the commissioners of the United
Colonies. The ambassador was further commended to
the government at Plymouth, meanwhile, since that col-
ony was much more intimately concerned than the Bay
Colony with the welfare of the Abenakis. So Winslow
passed on with Dreuillettes to Plymouth ; and the priest
tells us how courteous was the reception which the Pil-
grims accorded to him.

It is among the most striking contrasts in American
history to find this Jesuit priest at Plymouth Rock,
holding converse vfiih the Pilgrim magistrates. The
account which he has left to us of this visit is scant,
but it includes a notice of the dinner which Governor

14 THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON.

Bradford gave him on a Friday, when, out of respect
to his guest's religion, the table was set with fish alone.
It would be interesting to know whom Bradford sum-
moned to share with him and his visitor this frugal
repast in that December day of 1650. Whom could
he have selected to discuss with him the momentous
question which Dreuillettes had proposed? Bradford
could hardly have failed to send across the bay to the
Duxbury shore to summon that chief of his counsel-
lors when matters of war were in question, the fiery
little Pilgrim soldier, Myles Standish. It does no vio-
lence to probability to imagine this group, after the
governor's hospitable table had been left, strolling up
the path that led directly from the governor's house
to the Burial Hill that overtopped the village. Here,
on the bulwarks of the timber fort which crowned
the eminence, we can picture them as they continued
their talk.

It was a suggestive knot of men indeed. Bradford
steadily, from the day when he signed the compact
of self-government in the cabin of the "Mayflower,"
had grown gray in the service of the little colony;
and now that Winthrop of Massachusetts was dead,
there was no one in New England territory more rev-
erenced than he, — a grave, learned man, and one who
knew the traditions and purposes of the Pilgrim Church
from its earliest daj^s in the Yorkshire fields. Let us
behold him here upon the ramparted roof of the fort,
sweeping his hand over the country which lay spread

THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON. 15

out beneath, wrapped in the winter's snow. He could
have impressed upon the Jesuit mind how the little
colony had succeeded in living at peace with the neigh-
boring savages. " On yonder hill," he could say, " and
before we had been here many weeks, we met the
sachem of this region ; and then and there, without a
hostile weapon in our hands, we entered upon a pact
of fellowship which neither of us have broken from
that day to this, now going on thirty years."

The Jesuit might well reply : " Our people had
scarcely seated themselves in Quebec when we slew
the Iroquois ; and for fourscore years we have suffered
from their bloody reprisals; and that we may have
no more of them, I have come to ask your help."

The governor shook his head. " The Iroquois have
never w ronged us : why should we wrong them ? We
cannot fight, unless we have reason for it;" and he
turned his eyes upon Myles Standish.

One would like to know, as the Jesuit's gaze fol-
lowed that of Bradford, and the eyes of the priest met
those of that redoubtable soldier, if there was any
token of sympathy between them that the governor
did or did not comprehend. Standish in his early life,
fighting as a soldier of fortune in the Low Countries,
had not always marshalled reasons for wielding his
sword ; and it was not unwittingly that Bradford now
turned his glance upon his associate. As a scion of a
Catholic family in Lancashire, Standish had never
renounced, so far as any one has been able to dis-

16 THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON.

cover, the religion that blessed his cradle. So far also
as can be learned, his associates in Plymouth had never
bound him to their own covenant of faith. He and
they had got on together through the natural depen-
dence which was placed on him as the captain of
their little host and as a counsellor in their public
affairs. If there was any betrayal by Standish of an
inherited faith, the Jesuit does not record it. As the
two looked across the bay to that eminence crowned
to-day by the statue of this Pilgrim soldier, the priest
could but wonder at that confidence in the pact with
Massasoit which gave to Standish's home, so far remote
from the settlements, a security that had never been
possible on the St. Lawrence.

Hardly a less instructive scene was that a few days
after, when Dreuillettes, returning to Boston, stopped
for the night at the house of the Apostle Eliot. What
visions of the savage pupils, gathered about the hearth
of Eliot, must have come back to him over the gulf
of twenty years, sitting now, as we have fancied, amid
this dusky throng congregated at the Sault! That
Protestant guide to the Massachusetts Indians w^as at
the time of Dreuillettes' visit organizing his native
church at Natick ; and we can easily picture the two
missionaries placing their experiences in comparison,
and discussing the ways of reaching the savage con-
sciousness. Eliot might have shown to his guest his
translation of the Scriptures into the Indian speech,
already begun. Some years before this visit was re-

THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON. 17

called, the Natick Bible had already been put in type by
an Indian convert under the shadow of Harvard College.
One can easily see, from the Jesuit's account of this
intercourse, that it had raised feelings of respect, and
perhaps even of affection, between the Catholic and the
Protestant. Dreuillettes mentions how Eliot urged
him to pass the winter with him ; but the Jesuit could
get as yet no definite reply from the commissioners of
the United Colonies, and hastened back to Quebec. He
repeated his visit the next summer, when he met these
higher authorities at their gathering in Hartford.

During these two visits, covering the length and
breadth of New England, this Jesuit ambassador, com-
ing, not as a woodpecker that looketh for the rot, had
not failed, as he tells us, to remark upon the homely
thrift and vitality of a colonial life so different from
what he had known in Canada. He found bridges to
cross streams. He saw forges blazing where the deft
craftsman worked the iron of the bogs. He heard the
clatter of saw-mills. He noted the Yorkshire immi-
grant weaving cotton which had been brought from
Barbadoes. He listened everywhere to the stmh of a
scythe which a New England farmer had invented.
He quaffed along the seaboard, wherever there was a
rope-walk, the healing odor of the tar which their brig-
antines had brought from other coasts. He saw sheep
dotting the hill-side, and cattle everywhere browsing
in the pastures. Colts drooped their heads over the
fences as he passed, and the farmer told him that the

3

18 THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON.

next year he should send them to the West Indies in
payment for molasses. The merchants of Boston ex-
plained their ventures to St. Kitts, Fayal, and Bilboa.
He found that strangers were admitted to the benefits
of trade, and the exclusiveness of the Puritan rule was
already relaxing, and giving way to broader sympathies.
He saw the new pine-tree shillings, coined in defiance
of the royal prerogative, — one of the signs of that
New England independence, which was always wary.
The colonial politicians told him how a stray sow,
reminding him of the wolf that suckled the infant
Rome, had started a warm discussion, which ended, as
befitted their English blood, in a stubborn adherence
to a dual chamber in their legislative concerns. He
saw that in not forgetting the warning of Moses to
divide their soil among as great a number of citizens
as was possible, they had established their state upon
a foundation that seigneuries could not supply.

Such were the strange, suggestive lessons of the life
to which he was not used. He recalled what he had
seen to the authorities at Quebec on his return. He
must have dwelt upon them by the aid of a still vivid
memory, as we observe him now at the Sault. He
was, so far as we can discover, the only one of that
little band of Frenchmen, gathered about Saint Lusson,
who knew enough of these Englisli, whom they looked
forward to encounter, to divine the outcome of that
trial of endurance and contention which they planned
on the morrow to invite. Saint Lusson knew that to

THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON. 19

make good the territorial pretensions of his country-
men involved the occupation of the great valley of
the Mississippi, wherein they could hardly hope to
avoid a conflict, sooner or later, with these same
English.

Let us look for a moment at the condition of that
English race along the Atlantic seaboard in this year
of grace 1671, twenty years after Dreuillettes had
been among them in New England. The contrast to
New France was even greater than the Jesuit had found
it. Massachusetts had just emerged triumphant from
an inquisitorial contest with the Home Government, and
she had given her perverted charter a new life. Con-
necticut had become consolidated with New Haven,
under a charter yet to be heard of in the northwest.
While the fur-trade was of importance in Maine and
the Connecticut valley, it contributed but a small share
to the prosperity of the people. The streams that in
Canada made canoe-paths in the search for peltries
thwarted the thrift of the ploughman ; but the streams
in New England, by furnishing power, made manufac-
tures the handmaid of agriculture. If the New Eng-
lander failed in woodcraft, as compared with the Cana-
dian, he had no superior on the sea. There is nothing
like a life on the North Atlantic to try the intrepidity
of a sailor. The New Englander had learned to build
as fine vessels as floated. They bore the English flag
everywhere, to distances far greater than the lilies of
France had been borne along the lakes. These ships

20 THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON.

carried to England the finest masts in the world for
the equipment of the royal navy. Boston, which in
Dreuillettes' time engrossed almost all the carrying
trade of New England, now shared it with port after
port along the marvellously indented coast. They fed
Virginia and the Southern colonies out of a glaciated
soil that in these later days, in competition with the
West, is checkered with abandoned farms. They carried
food to the fishing fleet of all nations which frequented
the Grand Banks. They took cargoes of pipe-staves
to every wine-producing country of the world. They
carried wool to Bordeaux, and brought home the French
linens. They went for sugar to the West Indies, and
sent rum to Guinea and Madagascar. Boston, with her
twenty-five hundred houses, had grown to be the finest
town in North America.

Along the line of the Mohawk and the Hudson there
was a fusion of English and Dutch that promised well,
and nearer Manhattan, the Huguenot blood, which they
scorned in Quebec, was already beginning to add a fine
fibre to the race. This amalgamated folk in New York
afforded the only considerable rivals in the fur- trade
which the French had yet found south of the St. Law-
rence. Farther south on the Jersey shore an infusion
of New England blood was developing agriculture and
moulding the laws. On the Chesapeake and by the
tide-water of Virginia there was quite a different type
of Englishman, mixed with Scotch and German. They
knew little of commerce. Boston ships took away their

THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON. 21

tobacco. They hardly knew what a town was, and
there were few among them that lived by handicrafts ;
but they were good woodsmen, and the French had
more to fear from them in the near future than from
any others. Governor Berkeley had sent Lederer along
the Appalachian slopes, and here and there he had
climbed to a summit and looked over into the great
valley beyond the hills; but there were very vague
notions of its extent. For twenty years there had
been a popular map circulated in England among in-
tending immigrants to Virginia, which seemed to imply
that the Pacific flowed wholly over what we now know
as the valley of the Mississippi, — so little knowledge
had the discoveries of the French imparted to their
neighbors across the Channel.

In the modern Carolina there was a proprietary
government jealously guarding a charter which carried
its western bounds to the South Sea, wherever it
might be. These proprietors had drawn to the soil a
strange conglomeration of spirits upon whom it was
desired to impress the baronial ideals of John Locke, —
dissenters from Virginia, wanderers from Barbadoes,
and restless New Englanders. This ill-assorted people
were divided into planters, traders, and hunters.

It was a question, and a serious one to the French,
how long this Appalachian range would confine to the
Atlantic slope this attenuated line of English from
Massachusetts Bay to Carolina. There were grave

22 THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON.

apprehensions at Quebec when Talon had organized
the expedition of Saint Lusson. The Intendant could
but see that New France was flanked on the north by
the English at Hudson Bay, and (now that New Amster-
dam had fallen) by the same English on the south.
Nevertheless, Talon had fair ground to expect that
the English advance towards the west would be de-
layed so long as commerce and agriculture kept the
settlers busy, and so long as the eastern slopes of the
mountains were broad enough to sustain their popula-
tion. It was thus upon the mercantile thrift and farm-
ing instincts of the English colonists that the French
could best depend for unopposed occupation of the
great valley of the Mississippi. Charlevoix at a later
day comprehended this exactly. The settlers in New
York had indeed succeeded to the Iroquois alliance
which the Dutch had fostered, and it was certain that
in the Seneca country there were small obstacles to their
entering the great valley, if they should push along
the affluents of the Ohio ; but there was as yet no dis-
position to such enterprise.

It has been said that no one in this little pioneer
band of the French at the Sault understood the latent
force of the English so well as Dreuillettes, or compre-
hended so eagerly what it could accomplish if once it
broke the mountain barrier. He tells us how the sturdy
concentration of New England had impressed him in
her sons who ploughed the land and furrowed the seas

THE PAGEANT OP SAINT LUSSON. 23

with equal virility. He had contrasted this steady
purpose with the wild restlessness that shot the rapids
of the Canadian rivers. The men who took rum, cod-
fish, and clapboards across the turbulent waters to
Spain, Portugal, and the West Indies, and were bronzed
in the salt air, were the fathers of families. The Cana-
dian voyageurs shunned the settlement, for fear that they
might be compelled to marry. '^ Teach people their
duties," says Diogenes in Landor, " and they will know
their interests." The Massachusetts town-meeting gave
an inspiration that was absolutely wanting in the feudal
seigneuries of Montreal and Quebec. Church-member-
ship as a .condition of freemanship brought religion to
the core of every-day life. The black-robed priests and
white nuns- of New France created a class. These are
things which Dreuillettes had seen and could hardly
have forgotten, and he may well have asked himself
if these alien people and their kindred were long to be
hemmed in by the Appalachians ? It has often been
a boast of the historians of New France that while
their pioneers were pushing from Gasp6 to the western
verge of Superior, the English were content to keep
within smell of tide-water. But they forget that it
is not wandering that subdues the earth. Carrying
trinkets to the Indians, and taking his skins in exchange,
laid open the water-ways, but it did not develop the
country. The Home Government of France put strin-
gent requirements upon the Canadian settlers to keep
w^ithin the protection which the palisaded posts could

24 THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON.

extend. Agriculture spoiled the country for the beaver
and the musquash, and the well-being of the colony was
sacrificed to the gain of the fur-companies. Champlain
had looked forward with apprehension to a policy which
discouraged family life and farmsteads. The fact was,
that the more extended New France became, the
weaker she grew. The self-centring of New England
prepared her in due time for that western movement
when her tillers of the soil could make habitable a
region that France had only unfolded to geography.
The New England blood of Michigan tells the story
to-day.

But I have kept you too long from this significant
scene at the Sault. It was on the morning of the
14th of June, 1671, when Saint Lusson formed his lit-
tle band of followers at his camp beside the rapids,
arrayed in what of splendor they had brought into
the wilderness, and bearing their newly burnished
arms. With their vestments cleansed and gathered
about them, four Jesuits walked at the head of the
line. They were Dablon, the spiritual head of these
distant missions ; Allouez, whom we have encountered
at Ashland Bay; Andre, his companion; and Dreuil-
lettes, whose conscious being we have been trying to
lay bare. Their names stand still as they wrote them
in official attestation on the instrument which records
the proceedings of which they were a part. With sol-
emn step Saint Lusson led his compatriots to a little

THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON. 25

knoll neighboring to the paHsade of the Jesuits. Here
a huge cross of wood had been made ready, and lay
upon the ground. A vast throng of many-tinted In-
dians, which had hovered about the little column on
its way, spread over the near ground, and formed a
ragged circle about the spot. Some of the savages
stood, with the breezes from the Sault fanning their
plumes; others crouched on the soil as only Indians
can ; and here and there, on little undulations of the
ground, the more supple fell into picturesque groups,
giving a better view to those who stood behind. All
along this dusky horde, set off with the saffron and
vermilion of the forest adornments, there was the glis-
tening jet of curious eyes.

The Frenchmen were grouped in the centre about
the prostrate cross. Father Dablon stepped forward,
and with outstretched arms sanctified it with a solemn
blessing. At a sign from Saint Lusson, some stalwart
shoulders were placed beneath the holy wood, and the
huge symbol of redemption lifted its head slowly in
the air, till its foot fell at last into the cavity which
had been made for it. As the dull thud of the im-
pact fell on the eager ears, every Frenchman's cap
was off. While the earth was thrown about the cross,
their voices rose in unison in that grand old seventh-
century hymn, the Vexilla Regis. A graver in Paris
had cut the royal arms in conventional style on a
metal plate, and Colbert had taken care that this
token of possession was sent to Talon. By him it had

26 THE PAGEANT OF SAI^fT LUSSON.

been committed to Saint Lusson. A cedar post had
been erected close to the cross ; and while this plate
was fastened to it, the Exaiidiat was chanted, and one
of the priests muttered a prayer for the king.

There was a rustle among the crowding savages,
with eyes and ears bent still closer upon the great
man before them who represented the majesty of
France. Saint Lusson walked conspicuously to the
front, with a sword stretched in one hand, and a
crumbling turf of earth extended in the other. He
then spoke in words something like these : —

"In the name of the most high and redoubtable
sovereign, Louis the Fourteenth, Christian King of
France and Navarre, I now take possession of all these
lakes, straits, rivers, islands, and regions lying adja-
cent thereto, whether as yet visited by my subjects
or unvisited ; whether stretching to the sea at the
north or at the west, or on the opposite side extend-
ing to the South Sea. And I declare to all the people
inhabiting this wide country that they now become
my vassals, and must obey my laws and customs. I
promise to protect them against all enemies. I de-
clare to all other princes and potentates of whatever
rank, and I warn their subjects, that they are denied
forever seizing upon or settling within these circum-
jacent seas, except it be the pleasure of myself or
my viceroys to permit them. I declare that I will
resent and punish any such presumption. Vive le
Boy .' "

THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON. 27

The responsive shouts of the followers of Saint Lus-
son were drowned in the volleys of their guns and
by the yelps of the capering savages.

As soon as silence could be restored, Father Allouez
stepped forward to address these unwitting vassals of
the woods. He told them how important the work
was in which they had just assisted. He pointed to
the cross, and reminded them of the story which it
signified, and which he had so often rehearsed. He
pointed to the blazon of the royal arms, and told them
that they stood for the sovereignty of a great lord of
the earth, whose grandeur was as the tall oak com-
pared with the grass that bent beneath their moc-
casins. He referred to the great man at Quebec who
represented this mighty king, and told them that he
was but one of this imperial master's ten thousand
powerful captains. "I am going on the war-path,
cries this mighty king, and every one of these ten
thousand captains," shouted Allouez, "starts off with
a hundred warriors in his train. They may go by
sea," said the priest again, " in such ships as you have
seen at Quebec, not in canoes like yours, holding at
the most only ten men, but in vessels that will carry,
if need be, as many thousand. They may go by
land ; and it would take a steadfast foot to pass along
their ranks for more than twenty leagues. When
the earth trembles, and it thunders, and the air is
on fire, it is our king attacking his enemies. The
blood of those he kills flows in streams, and men do

ff OF TRK

28 THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON.

not say how many scalps he has taken, but how large
is this river of blood. So terrible is he that nations
no longer war with him; but fall prostrate when he
looks. His word is the law of the world.

"You have a few sacks of corn, a hatchet or two,
and call yourself rich. He possesses cities in number
beyond the members of your tribe, a city for a man.
His own palace is longer than from here to the top
of the Sault, and the tallest trees would not reach
its roof. He has a family in it more numerous than
the people in one of your towns."

In such an atmosphere of rhetorical smoke, the
swarthy savages grunted and wrapped themselves in
amazement. The French had cast a die that fore-
boded they knew not what. One at least among
them, in his forecast of the future, might have ven-
tured a suspicion in accordance with the truth that not
the race of Dablon and of Talon, but that of Eliot and
Bradford, would yet possess these magnificent realms
of the earth.

One thing was certainly apparent at the mo-
ment. The French could not long delay to try, at
least, to make good the grandeur of their hopes. The
rugged Frontenac had but just arrived at Quebec, and
the burden w^as his. The story of the discovery of the
Mississippi by Joliet and Marquette, it is not neces-
sary to dwell upon further than to say that it made it
sure how by the Wisconsin or the Illinois one could

THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON. 29

float, not to the Atlantic or the Pacific, but to the
Gulf of Mexico.

Instigated by this success, and impelled by a desire
to connect by a great route the two chief portals of
the continent, the Gulfs of St. Lawrence and Mexico,
La Salle entered upon his scheme of developing the
great valley. In a few years he succeeded in erecting
his emblems of occupation on one of the deltas at the
mouth of the great river. It had taken nearly a hun-
dred and fifty years to complete the cordon since Car-
tier had raised his cross at Gaspe. To give something
like detail to these claims, Duluth had also announced
possession among the Sioux, and Hennepin had followed
the reaches of the Upper Mississippi.

Meanwhile the English were preparing for the in-
evitable invasion. They began by treating with the
Iroquois for mutual advantages; and as those confed-
erates drove their enemies along the southern shores
of Lake Erie, and even pushed them beyond Lake Mich-
igan, there Ayere English traders from Albany and the
East to follow not far in their rear. Tlie conflict which
the French had sustained with the Iroquois along the
St. Lawrence, they now found they must repeat on the
Illinois and the Mississippi.

Ever since La Salle had closed the Mississippi to
the Spaniards by his visit to the deltas, it had been
the purpose of the French to patrol, as it were, the
entire line of transit from the Gulf to the Sault, with
fortified posts at salient points ; and later by con-

30 THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON.

tinning this line up the Ohio, to connect Ontario and
the St. Lawrence Gulf by a similar circuit. These
English incursions on the trail of the Iroquois were
but the beginning of a counter-movement on their
part. The movement, however, found many checks.
Phips failed at Quebec; Frontenac dealt his blows
effectively along the northern bounds of New England
and New York ; while Perrot took formal occupation of
the country west of Superior, and Cadillac seized the
straits at Detroit and defied any hostile inroad upon
the upper lakes.

The treaty of Kyswick in 1697 had left France in
formal possession of the great valley; but her occupa-
tion was more in name than in power. The ice-locked
channels of the lakes cut them off from Quebec for
a large part of the year, and it was far easier for the
settlers on the Illinois to drift toward the Gulf than for
canoe or batteau to push up against the current.

Meanwhile the English and Scotch traders were
following the lateral valleys everywhere. When the
French king farmed out the Indian trade of the great
watershed to Crozat, his agents complained that they
encountered the trading adventurers from over the
mountains. These intruders went by ways that were
known to them ; but Spotswood of Virginia was not
behindhand in sending his rangers along the moun-
tain summits to inspect the passes.

The question became serious when by the treaty
of Utrecht, in 1713, the French monarch had acknowl-

THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON. 31

edged the subjection of the Iroquois to the English;
for the Enghsh interpreted it to mean that it gave
them jurisdiction, not only throughout the lands actu-
ally occupied by the confederacy, but that it estab-
lished the English rule over all the regions west and
south, where the Iroquois warriors had driven its occu-
pants. This claim was made on the plea that such
territory was conquered territory of the Iroquois, and
included in the surrender of the confederates. Shortly
afterwards Spotswood of Virginia started on a recon-
noissance that boded no good to the French. He led
his knights of the Golden Spur over the mountains,
and his merry company shouted and sang in triumph
on the slopes of the Great Valley. It was the hindered
spirit of the Virginians let loose, and nowhere else,
along the imposing barrier from the Catskills to north-
ern Alabama, was there a path over the passes so easy
and unentangled as this which Spotswood had found.
It was thus by the valley of the Shenandoah that the
songs and footfalls of rollicking Virginians mingled
with the splashes of the upper affluents of the Ten-
nessee, and the way was opened for the coming occu-
pation of the region south of the Ohio by the Anglo-
German and Scotch-Irish pioneers from the valley of
Virginia. The men of New York were not far behind.
They planted a post at Oswego, and began to intercept
the traders from Quebec. The French attempted a
flank movement by establishing posts on Lake Cliaiu-
plain and at Niagara; but the purpose of the English

32 THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LUSSON.

was steady. By treaty after treaty they acquired
more and more what it served their purpose to call
the rights of the Iroquois. This paper conquest was
as good as completed in the treaty signed in 1744 at
Lancaster in Pennsylvania. More active aggressions
followed. All along the Ohio the cabin of the English
trader flaunted the British flag ; and the conflict could
not long be put off when the Ohio Company, in 1750,
received its ample grants, throughout a region where
a French emissary from Quebec had here and there
buried his engraved plates, setting forth the claims of
his royal master. Celoron tells us that he crossed from
Lake Erie by the Chautauqua portage, and following
down the streams, he found that the English packman
was everywhere in advance.

The treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748, was but a
pretence of peace. Both sides were given time under
it to prepare for the struggle. It was not long be-
fore Charles Townshend in the English Parliament
was crying that the time had come. Virginia took
the first warlike step in sending a party to build a
fort at the forks of the Ohio, just at a time when
France gave her last pledge along the Mississippi in
the reconstruction of Fort Chartres.

Events had now begun to move rapidly, and it fell
to Washington's share to fire the first shot in the long
war which reached a decision on the Plains of Abra-
ham ; and within two years more the lily flag had
come down at Detroit and Mackinac. The Appala-

THE PAGEANT OF SAINT LC/SSON. 33

chians had disappeared more completely than the
Pyrenees in the vision of Louis the Fourteenth. It
had taken ninety years from the time when Saint
Lusson threw down the gage, for the meteor flag to
reach the Sault. Dreuillettes, an old man of eighty-
eight, had fallen into his grave at Quebec long before
the time when English courage and constancy, which
he had so long ago recognized, thus reached its natu-
ral goal. The negotiations for a confirmed peace at
Paris in 1763 were hardly less cardinal than the de-
feat of Montcalm at Quebec.

It may excite a smile to-day that Canada should be
weighed in the balance against Guadeloupe ; but the
decision as to which of the two dependencies France
should be permitted to retain, was long delayed. The
English press teemed with pamphlets in advocacy of
one or the other; and not the least effective of them
was one by Franklin, urging the retention of Canada
as the only security for a peaceful future. The argu-
ment for Guadeloupe was not without wisdom in the
light of coming events. If the standing menace of
Frenchmen on their borders should be removed, it
was held that the English colonists would have oppor-
tunities to develop independence of the mother-country.
But that future does not concern us now, while we
ask : To what condition had New France been re-
duced ? She had already secretly anticipated the inevi-
table, and yielded everything beyond the Mississippi
to Spain ; and of all the vast domain, bounded by

34 THfi ■ P'AG&ANT OF SAINT LUSSON.

the circumjacent oceans, which she had proudly
claimed at the Sault ninety-two years before, noth-
ing was left but two little islands on the coast of
Newfoundland, piteously awarded to her as fishing
stations to secure her food on the fast-days of her
religion. New France, an empire without a nation,
had disappeared.

>

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