Priests Reach Detroit and Saut Ste. Marie

This is the first recorded passage of white men through the Strait of Detroit; though Joliet had, no doubt, passed this way on his return from the Upper Lakes.

Previously in The Discovery of the Great West.

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Talon had sent him to discover and explore the copper-mines of Lake Superior. He had failed in the attempt and was now returning. His Indian guide, afraid of passing the Niagara portage lest he should meet enemies, had led him from Lake Erie, by way of Grand River, towards the head of Lake Ontario; and thus it was that he met La Salle and the Sulpitians.

This meeting caused a change of plan. Joliet showed the priests a map which he had made, of such parts of the Upper Lakes as he had visited and gave them a copy of it; telling them, at the same time, of the Pottawattamies, and other tribes of that region, in grievous need of spiritual succor. The result was a determination on their part to follow the route which he suggested, notwithstanding the remonstrances of La Salle, who in vain reminded them that the Jesuits had pre-occupied the field and would regard them as intruders. They resolved that the Pottawattamies should no longer sit in darkness; while, as for the Mississippi, it could be reached, as they conceived, with less risk by this northern route than by that of the south.

Since reaching the head of Lake Ontario, La Salle had been attacked by a violent fever, from which he was not yet recovered. He now told his two colleagues that he was in no condition to go forward and should be forced to part with them. The staple of La Salle’s character, as his life will attest, was an invincible determination of purpose, which set at naught all risks and all sufferings. He had cast himself with all his resources into this enterprise, and, while his faculties remained, he was not a man to recoil from it. On the other hand, the masculine fibre of which he was made did not always withhold him from the practice of the arts of address, and the use of what Dollier de Casson styles belles paroles. He respected the priesthood, — with the exception, it seems, of the Jesuits, — and he was under obligations to the Sulpitians of Montreal. Hence there can be no doubt that he used his illness as a pretext for escaping from their company without ungraciousness and following his own path in his own way.

On the last day of September, the priests made an altar, supported by the paddles of the canoes laid on forked sticks. Dollier said mass; La Salle and his followers received the sacrament, as did also those of his late colleagues; and thus they parted, — the Sulpitians and their party descending the Grand River towards Lake Erie, while La Salle, as they supposed, began his return to Montreal. What course he actually took, we shall soon inquire; and meanwhile, for a few moments, we will follow the priests. When they reached Lake Erie, they saw it tossing like an angry ocean under a wild autumnal sky. They had no mind to tempt the dangerous and unknown navigation and encamped for the winter in the forest near the peninsula called the Long Point. Here they gathered a good store of chestnuts, hickory-nuts, plums, and grapes; and built themselves a log- cabin, with a recess at the end for an altar. They passed the winter unmolested, shooting game in abundance, and saying mass three times a week. Early in spring, they planted a large cross, attached to it the arms of France, and took formal possession of the country in the name of Louis XIV. This done, they resumed their voyage, and, after many troubles, landed one evening in a state of exhaustion on or near Point Pelée, towards the western extremity of Lake Erie. A storm rose as they lay asleep, and swept off a great part of their baggage, which, in their fatigue, they had left at the edge of the water. Their altar-service was lost with the rest, — a misfortune which they ascribed to the jealousy and malice of the Devil. Debarred henceforth from saying mass, they resolved to return to Montreal and leave the Pottawattamies uninstructed. They presently entered the strait by which Lake Huron joins Lake Erie; and, landing near where Detroit now stands, found a large stone, somewhat suggestive of the human figure, which the Indians had bedaubed with paint, and which they worshipped as a manito. In view of their late misfortune, this device of the arch-enemy excited their utmost resentment. “After the loss of our altar-service,” writes Galinée, “and the hunger we had suffered, there was not a man of us who was not filled with hatred against this false deity. I devoted one of my axes to breaking him in pieces; and then, having fastened our canoes side by side, we carried the largest piece to the middle of the river, and threw it, with all the rest, into the water, that he might never be heard of again.”

This is the first recorded passage of white men through the Strait of Detroit; though Joliet had, no doubt, passed this way on his return from the Upper Lakes. [1] The two missionaries took this course, with the intention of proceeding to the Saut Sainte Marie, and there joining the Ottawas, and other tribes of that region, in their yearly descent to Montreal. They issued upon Lake Huron; followed its eastern shores till they reached the Georgian Bay, near the head of which the Jesuits had established their great mission of the Hurons, destroyed, twenty years before, by the Iroquois; [2] and, ignoring or slighting the labors of the rival missionaries, held their way northward along the rocky archipelago that edged those lonely coasts.

[1: The Jesuits and fur-traders, on their way to the Upper Lakes, had followed the route of the Ottawa, or, more recently, that of Toronto and the Georgian Bay. Iroquois hostility had long closed the Niagara portage and Lake Erie against them.]

[2: “Jesuits in North America.”]

They passed the Manatoulins, and, ascending the strait by which Lake Superior discharges its waters, arrived on the twenty-fifth of May at Ste. Marie du Saut. Here they found the two Jesuits, Dablon and Marquette, in a square fort of cedar pickets, built by their men within the past year, and enclosing a chapel and a house. Near by, they had cleared a large tract of land, and sown it with wheat, Indian corn, peas, and other crops. The new-comers were graciously received and invited to vespers in the chapel; but they very soon found La Salle’s prediction made good, and saw that the Jesuit fathers wanted no help from St. Sulpice. Galinée, on his part, takes occasion to remark that, though the Jesuits had baptized a few Indians at the Saut, not one of them was a good enough Christian to receive the Eucharist; and he intimates, that the case, by their own showing, was still worse at their mission of St. Esprit. The two Sulpitians did not care to prolong their stay; and, three days after their arrival, they left the Saut: not, as they expected, with the Indians, but with a French guide, furnished by the Jesuits. Ascending French River to Lake Nipissing, they crossed to the waters of the Ottawa, and descended to Montreal, which they reached on the eighteenth of June. They had made no discoveries and no converts; but Galinée, after his arrival, made the earliest map of the Upper Lakes known to exist. [3]

[3: Galinée appears to have made use of the map given him by Joliet. He says, in the narrative of his journey, that he has laid down on his own map nothing but what he had himself seen; but this is disproved by the map itself. Thus, he represents with minuteness the northern coast as far west as the islands at the mouth of Green Bay; but that he never went so far is evident not only from his own journal, but from the fact that he was ignorant of the existence of the Straits of Michillimackinac and the peninsula of Michigan; Lakes Huron and Michigan being by him merged into one, under the name of “Michigané, ou Mer Douce des Hurons.” The map, of which a facsimile is before me, measures four and a half feet by three and a half. It is covered with descriptive remarks, which, oddly enough, are all inverted, so that it must be turned with the north side down in order to read them. Faillon has engraved it, but on a small scale, with the omission of most of the inscriptions, and other changes. The well- known Jesuit map of Lake Superior appeared the year after.

Besides making the map, Galinée wrote a very long and minute journal of the expedition, which is preserved in the Bibliothèque Impériale.

Much of the substance of it is given by Faillon, Colonie Française, iii. chap, vii., and Margry, Journal Général de l’Instruction Publique, xxxi. No. 67. In the letters of Talon to Colbert are various allusions to the journey of Dollier and Galinée.]

We return now to La Salle, only to find ourselves involved in mist and obscurity. What did he do after he left the two priests? Unfortunately, a definite answer is not possible; and the next two years of his life remain in some measure an enigma. That he was busied in active exploration, and that he made important discoveries, is certain; but the extent and character of these discoveries remain wrapped in doubt. He is known to have kept journals and made maps; and these were in existence, and in possession of his niece, Madeleine Cavelier, then in advanced age, as late as the year 1756; [4] beyond which time the most diligent inquiry has failed to trace them. The Abbé Faillon affirms, that some of La Salle’s men, refusing to follow him, returned to La Chine, and that the place then received its name, in derision of the young adventurer’s dream of a westward passage to China. [5] As for himself, the only distinct record of his movements is that contained in an unpublished paper, entitled, “Histoire de Monsieur de la Salle.” It is an account of his explorations, and of the state of parties in Canada previous to the year 1678; taken from the lips of La Salle himself, by a person whose name does not appear, but who declares that he had ten or twelve conversations with him at Paris, whither he had come with a petition to the Court. The writer himself had never been in America and was ignorant of its geography; hence blunders on his part might reasonably be expected. His statements, however, are in some measure intelligible; and the following is the substance of them.

[4: See Margry, in Journal Général de l’Instruction Publique, xxxi. 659.]

[5: Dollier de Casson alludes to this as “cette transmigration célèbre qui se fit de la Chine dans ces quartiers.”]

After leaving the priests, La Salle went to Onondaga, where we are left to infer that he succeeded better in getting a guide than he had before done among the Senecas. Thence he made his way to a point six or seven leagues distant from Lake Erie, where he reached a branch of the Ohio; and, descending it, followed the river as far as the rapids at Louisville, or, as has been maintained, beyond its confluence with the Mississippi. His men now refused to go farther, and abandoned him, escaping to the English and the Dutch; whereupon he retraced his steps alone.

– The Discovery of the Great West, Chapter 2 by Francis Parkman

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Introduction.

If, at times, it may seem that range has been allowed to fancy, it is so in appearance only; since the minutest details of narrative or description rest on authentic documents or on personal observation.

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them, he must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

With respect to that special research which, if inadequate, is still in the most emphatic sense indispensable, it has been the writer’s aim to exhaust the existing material of every subject treated. While it would be folly to claim success in such an attempt, he has reason to hope that, so far at least as relates to the present volume, nothing of much importance has escaped him. With respect to the general preparation just alluded to, he has long been too fond of his theme to neglect any means within his reach of making his conception of it distinct and true.

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