Parkman Vol. 3, Chapter 9

Nevertheless, his energy and address make him equal to anything; and now, at a season when everybody is in fear of the ice, he is setting out to begin a new fort.

Previously in The Discovery of the Great West.

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

La Salle seems to have had an interview with the minister, in which the proposals of his memorial were somewhat modified. He soon received in reply the following patent from the King:

Louis, by the grace of God King of France and Navarre, to our dear and well-beloved Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, greeting. We have received with favor the very humble petition made us in your name, to permit you to labor at the discovery of the western parts of New France; and we have the more willingly entertained this proposal, since we have nothing more at heart than the exploration of this country, through which, to all appearance, a way may be found to Mexico…. For this and other causes thereunto moving us, we permit you by these presents, signed with our hand, to labor at the discovery of the western parts of our aforesaid country of New France; and, for the execution of this enterprise, to build forts at such places as you may think necessary, and enjoy possession thereof under the same clauses and conditions as of Fort Frontenac, conformably to our letters patent of May thirteenth, 1675, which, so far as needful, we confirm by these presents. And it is our will that they be executed according to their form and tenor: on condition, nevertheless, that you finish this enterprise within five years, failing which, these presents shall be void, and of no effect; that you carry on no trade with the savages called Ottawas, or with other tribes who bring their peltries to Montreal; and that you do the whole at your own cost and that of your associates, to whom we have granted the sole right of trade in buffalo-hides. And we direct the Sieur Count Frontenac, our governor and lieutenant-general, and also Duchesneau, intendant of justice, police, and finance, and the officers of the supreme council of the aforesaid country, to see to the execution of these presents; for such is our pleasure.

Given at St. Germain en Laye, this 12th day of May, 1678, and of our reign the 35th year.”

This patent grants both more and less than the memorial had asked. It authorizes La Salle to build and own, not two forts only, but as many as he may see fit, provided that he do so within five years; and it gives him, besides, the monopoly of buffalo-hides, for which at first he had not petitioned. Nothing is said of colonies. To discover the country, secure it by forts, and find, if possible, a way to Mexico, are the only object set forth; for Louis XIV. always discountenanced settlement in the West, partly as tending to deplete Canada, and partly as removing his subjects too far from his paternal control. It was but the year before that he refused to Louis Joliet the permission to plant a trading station in the Valley of the Mississippi.[1] La Salle, however, still held to his plan of a commercial and industrial colony, and in connection with it to another purpose, of which his memorial had made no mention. This was the building of a vessel on some branch of the Mississippi, in order to sail down that river to its mouth, and open a route to commerce through the Gulf of Mexico. It is evident that this design was already formed; for he had no sooner received his patent, than he engaged ship-carpenters, and procured iron, cordage, and anchors, not for one vessel, but for two.

[1: Colbert à Duchesneau, 28 Avril, 1677.]

What he now most needed was money; and having none of his own, he set himself to raising it from others. A notary named Simonnet lent him four thousand livres; an advocate named Raoul, twenty-four thousand; and one Dumont, six thousand. His cousin François Plet, a merchant of Rue St. Martin, lent him about eleven thousand, at the interest of forty per cent; and when he returned to Canada, Frontenac found means to procure him another loan of about fourteen thousand, secured by the mortgage of Fort Frontenac. But his chief helpers were his family, who became sharers in his undertaking. “His brothers and relations,” says a memorial afterwards addressed by them to the King, “spared nothing to enable him to respond worthily to the royal goodness;” and the document adds, that, before his allotted five years were ended, his discoveries had cost them more than five hundred thousand livres (francs).[2] La Salle himself believed, and made others believe, that there was more profit than risk in his schemes.

[2: Mémoire au Roy, présenté sous la Régence; Obligation du Sieur de la Salle envers le Sieur Plet; Autres Emprunts de Cavelier de la Salle (Margry, i. 423-432).]

Lodged rather obscurely in Rue de la Truanderie, and of a nature reserved and shy, he nevertheless found countenance and support from personages no less exalted than Colbert, Seignelay, and the Prince de Conti. Others, too, in stations less conspicuous, warmly espoused his cause, and none more so than the learned Abbé Renaudot, who helped him with tongue and pen, and seems to have been instrumental in introducing to him a man who afterwards proved invaluable. This was Henri de Tonty, an Italian officer, a protégé of the Prince de Conti, who sent him to La Salle as a person suited to his purposes, Tonty had but one hand, the other having been blown off by a grenade in the Sicilian wars.[3] His father, who had been governor of Gaeta, but who had come to France in consequence of political disturbances in Naples, had earned no small reputation as a financier, and had invented the form of life insurance still called the Tontine. La Salle learned to know his new lieutenant on the voyage across the Atlantic; and, soon after reaching Canada, he wrote of him to his patron in the following terms: “His honorable character and his amiable disposition were well known to you; but perhaps you would not have thought him capable of doing things for which a strong constitution, an acquaintance with the country, and the use of both hands seemed absolutely necessary. Nevertheless, his energy and address make him equal to anything; and now, at a season when everybody is in fear of the ice, he is setting out to begin a new fort, two hundred leagues from this place, and to which I have taken the liberty to give the name of Fort Conti. It is situated near that great cataract, more than a hundred and twenty toises in height, by which the lakes of higher elevation precipitate themselves into Lake Frontenac [Ontario]. From there one goes by water, five hundred leagues, to the place where Fort Dauphin is to be begun; from which it only remains to descend the great river of the Bay of St. Esprit, to reach the Gulf of Mexico.”[4]

[3: Tonty, Mémoire, in Margry, Relations et Mémoires inédits, 5.]

[4: Lettre de La Salle, 31 Oct., 1678. Fort Conti was to have been built on the site of the present Fort Niagara. The name of Lac de Conti was given by La Salle to Lake Erie. The fort mentioned as Fort Dauphin was built, as we shall see, on the Illinois, though under another name. La Salle, deceived by Spanish maps, thought that the Mississippi discharged itself into the Bay of St. Esprit (Mobile Bay).]

Henri de Tonty signed his name in the Gallicized, and not in the original Italian form Tonti. He wore a hand of iron or some other metal, which was usually covered with a glove. La Potherie says that he once or twice used it to good purpose when the Indians became disorderly, in breaking the heads of the most contumacious or knocking out their teeth. Not knowing at the time the secret of the unusual efficacy of his blows, they regarded him as a “medicine” of the first order. La Potherie erroneously ascribes the loss of his hand to a saber-cut received in a sortie at Messina.

Besides Tonty, La Salle found in France another ally, La Motte de Lussière, to whom he offered a share in the enterprise, and who joined him at Rochelle, the place of embarkation. Here vexatious delays occurred. Bellinzani, director of trade, who had formerly taken lessons in rascality in the service of Cardinal Mazarin, abused his official position to throw obstacles in the way of La Salle, in order to extort money from him; and he extorted, in fact, a considerable sum, which his victim afterwards reclaimed. It was not till the fourteenth of July that La Salle, with Tonty, La Motte, and thirty men, set sail for Canada, and two months more elapsed before he reached Quebec. Here, to increase his resources and strengthen his position, he seems to have made a league with several Canadian merchants, some of whom had before been his enemies, and were to be so again. Here, too, he found Father Louis Hennepin, who had come down from Fort Frontenac to meet him.[5]

[5: La Motte de Lussière à–, sans date; Mémoíre de la Salle sur les Extorsions commises par Bellinzani; Société formée par La Salle; Relation de Henri de Tonty, 1684 (Margry, i. 338, 573; ii. 2, 25).]

Chapter 9

Hennepin was all eagerness to join in the adventure; and, to his great
satisfaction, La Salle gave him a letter from his Provincial, Father Le
Fèvre, containing the coveted permission. Whereupon, to prepare himself,
he went into retreat at the Récollet convent of Quebec, where he
remained for a time in such prayer and meditation as his nature, the
reverse of spiritual, would permit. Frontenac, always partial to his
Order, then invited him to dine at the château; and having visited the
bishop and asked his blessing, he went down to the Lower Town and
embarked. His vessel was a small birch canoe, paddled by two men. With
sandaled feet, a coarse gray capote, and peaked hood, the cord of St.
Francis about his waist, and a rosary and crucifix hanging at his side,
the father set forth on his memorable journey. He carried with him the
furniture of a portable altar, which in time of need he could strap on
his back like a knapsack.

He slowly made his way up the St. Lawrence, stopping here and there,
where a clearing and a few log houses marked the feeble beginning of a
parish and a seigniory. The settlers, though good Catholics, were too
few and too poor to support a priest, and hailed the arrival of the
friar with delight. He said mass, exhorted a little, as was his custom,
and on one occasion baptized a child. At length he reached Montreal,
where the enemies of the enterprise enticed away his two canoe-men. He
succeeded in finding two others, with whom he continued his voyage,
passed the rapids of the upper St. Lawrence, and reached Fort Frontenac
at eleven o’clock at night of the second of November, where his brethren
of the mission, Ribourde and Buisset, received him with open arms.[6]
La Motte, with most of the men, appeared on the eighth; but La Salle and
Tonty did not arrive till more than a month later. Meanwhile, in
pursuance of his orders, fifteen men set out in canoes for Lake Michigan
and the Illinois, to trade with the Indians and collect provisions,
while La Motte embarked in a small vessel for Niagara, accompanied by
Hennepin.[7]

[6: Hennepin, Description de la Louisiane (1683), 19; Ibid., Voyage
Curieux (1704), 66. Ribourde had lately arrived.]

[7: Lettre de La Motte de la Lussière, sans date; Relation de Henri
de Tonty écrite de Québec, le 14 Novembre, 1684 (Margry, i. 573). This
paper, apparently addressed to Abbé Renaudot, is entirely distinct from
Tonty’s memoir of 1693, addressed to the minister Ponchartrain.
[104] Hennepin, Description de la Louisiane (1683), 19; Ibid., Voyage
Curieux (1704), 66. Ribourde had lately arrived.]

– The Discovery of the Great West, Chapter 9 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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