Part 6

They were of a very social nature, these French _habitants_. They liked to meet frequently, enjoy their pipes, and tell stories of the hunt or of old days on the St. Lawrence. They were famous fiddlers, too. No wilderness so far away that the little French fiddle had not been there; the Indians recognized it as a part of the furniture of every fur trader's camp. Music appealed strongly to these warm natures, and the songs of the _voyageurs_, as they propelled their canoes along the Wisconsin rivers, always greatly interested travelers. French Canadians are still living in Wisconsin, who remember those gay melodies which echoed through our forests a hundred years ago.

The old French life continued in Wisconsin until well into the nineteenth century. Although New France fell in 1760, and the British came into control, they never succeeded in Anglicizing Wisconsin. English fur companies succeeded the French, and British soldiers occupied the Wisconsin forts; but the fur trade itself had still to be conducted through French residents, who alone had the confidence of the Indians. Great Britain was supposed to surrender all this country to the United States in 1796; but it was really 1816 before the American flag floated over Green Bay, and the American Fur Company came into power. But, even under this company, most of the actual trading was done through the French; so we may say that as long as the fur trade remained the chief industry of Wisconsin, about to the year 1835, the old French life was still maintained, and French methods were everywhere in evidence.

It is surprising how strongly marked upon our Wisconsin are the memories of the old French days. A quiet, unobtrusive people, were those early French, without high ambitions, and simple in their tastes; yet they and theirs have displayed remarkable tenacity of life, and doubtless their effect upon us of to-day will never be effaced. Our map is sprinkled all over with the French names which they gave to our hills and lakes and streams, and early towns. We may here mention a few only, at random: Lakes Flambeau, Court Oreilles, Pepin, Vieux Désert; the rivers Bois Brulé, Eau Claire, Eau Pleine, Embarrass, St. Croix; the counties Eau Claire, Fond du Lac, La Crosse, Langlade, Marquette, Portage, Racine, St. Croix, Trempealeau; the towns of Racine, La Crosse, Prairie du Chien, Butte des Morts. Scores of others can readily be found in the atlas. In the cities of Green Bay, Kaukauna, Portage, and Prairie du Chien, and the dreamy little Fox River hamlet of Grand Butte des Morts, are still to be found little closely-knit colonies of French Creoles, descendants of those who lived and ruled under the old French régime.

The time must come, in the molding of all the foreign elements in our midst into the American of the future, when the French element will no longer exist among us as an element, but merely as a memory. If our posterity can inherit from those early French occupants of our soil their simple tastes, their warm hearts, their happy temperament, their social virtues, then the old French régime will have brought a blessing to Wisconsin, and not merely a halo of historical romance.

THE COMING OF THE ENGLISH

Upon the eighth day of September, 1760, the French flag ceased to fly over Canada. In a long and bitter struggle, lasting at intervals through an entire century, French and English had been battling with each other for the control of the interior of this continent; and the former had lost everything at the decisive battle on the Plains of Abraham, before the walls of Quebec.

Reduced to the last extremity, the authorities of New France had ordered her fur traders, _coureurs de bois_ and all, to hurry down to the settlements on the St. Lawrence, and aid in protecting them against the English. Thus in the Wisconsin forests, when the end came, there were left no Frenchmen of importance. Leaving their Indian friends, and many of them their Indian wives and half-breed families, they had obeyed the far away summons, and several lost their lives in the great battle or in the skirmishes which preceded it. The others, who at last returned, were quick to show favor to the English, for little they really cared who were their political masters so long as they were let alone. The Indians, too, although personally they preferred the French to the English, were glad enough to see the latter, because they brought better prices for furs.

Wisconsin was so far away that it took a long time for British soldiers to reach the deserted and tumbledown fort at Green Bay. About the middle of October, 1761, there arrived from Mackinac Lieutenant James Gorrell and seventeen men to hold all of this country for King George. The station had been called by the French Fort St. Francis, but the name was now changed to Fort Edward Augustus.

It was a very lonely and dismal winter for the British soldiers, for nearly all the neighboring savages were away on their winter hunt and did not return until spring. Mackinac, then a poor little trading village, was two hundred forty miles away; there was a trading post at St. Josephs on the southeast shore of Lake Michigan, four hundred miles distant; and the nearest French villages on the Mississippi were eight hundred miles of canoe journey to the southwest. All between was savagery: here and there a squalid Indian village, with its conical wigwams of bark or matted reeds, pitched on the shore of a lake, at the foot of a portage trail, or on the banks of a forest stream. Now and then a French trading party passed along the frozen trails, following the natives on the hunt and poisoning their minds against the newcomers, who were struggling to make their poor old stockade a fairly decent shelter against the winter storms.

But, when the savages returned to Green Bay in the spring, they met with fair words from Gorrell, a plentiful distribution of presents, and good prices for furs, and their hearts were won. In 1763 occurred the great uprising led by Pontiac against the English in the Northwest, during which the garrison at Mackinac was massacred. This disturbed the friendship of Gorrell's neighbors, with the exception of a Menominee band, headed by chief Ogemaunee; and in June of that year the little garrison, together with the English traders at Green Bay, found it necessary to leave hastily for Cross Village, on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, escorted by Ogemaunee and ninety painted Menominees, who had volunteered to protect these Englishmen from the unfriendly Indians.

At Cross Village were several soldiers who had escaped from Mackinac, and the two parties and their escorts soon left in canoes for Montreal, by the way of Ottawa River. This old fur trade route was followed in order to escape Pontiac's Indians, who controlled the country about Detroit and along the lower lake. They arrived safely at their destination in August. The following year there was held a great council at Niagara, presided over by the famous Sir William Johnson, who was then serving as British superintendent for the Northern Indians. At this council Ogemaunee was present representing the Menominees of Wisconsin. In token of his valuable services in escorting Lieutenant Gorrell's party to Montreal, and thereby delivering them safely from the great danger which threatened, Ogemaunee was given a certificate, which reads as follows:--

This piece of paper, which showed that he was a good friend of the English, was of almost as great importance to Ogemaunee as a patent of nobility in the Old World. He carried it with him back to Wisconsin, and it remained in his family from one generation to another, for fully a hundred years. One day a blanketed and painted descendant of Ogemaunee presented it to an American officer who visited his wigwam. This descendant, doubtless, knew little of its meaning, but it had been used in his family as a charm for bringing good luck, and in his admiration for this kind officer he gave it to him, for the Indian is, by nature, grateful and generous. In the course of years the paper was presented to the State Historical Society, by which it is preserved as an interesting and suggestive relic of those early days of the English occupation of Wisconsin.

WISCONSIN IN THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR

We ordinarily think of the Revolutionary War as having been fought wholly upon the Atlantic slope. As a matter of fact, there were enacted west of the Alleghanies, during that great struggle, deeds which proved of immense importance to the welfare of the United States. Had it not been for the capture from the British of the country northwest of the Ohio River by the gallant Virginia colonel, George Rogers Clark, it is fair to assume that the Old Northwest, as it came to be called, the present States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, would to-day be a part of the Dominion of Canada.

After the brief flurry of the Pontiac conspiracy (1763), the Indians of the Old Northwest became good friends of the British, whose aim was to encourage the fur trade and to keep the savages good-natured. The English have always been more successful in their treatment of Indians than have Americans; they are more generous with them, and while not less firm than we, they are more considerate of savage wants. The French and the half-breeds, too, were very soon the warm supporters of British policy, because English fur trade companies gave them abundant employment, and evinced no desire other than to foster the primitive conditions under which the fur trade prospered.

The English were not desirous of settling the Western wilderness with farmers, thereby driving out the game. Our people, however, have always been of a land-grabbing temper; we have sought to beat down the walls of savagery, to push settlement, to cut down the forests, to plow the land, to drive the Indian out. This meant the death of the fur trade; hence it is small wonder that, when the Revolutionary War broke out, the French and Indians of the Northwest upheld the British and opposed the Americans.

A number of scattered white settlers and a few small villages had appeared along the Ohio River and many of its southern tributaries. In Kentucky there were several log forts, around each of which were grouped the rude cabins of frontiersmen, who were half farmers and half hunters, tall, stalwart fellows, as courageous as lions, and ever on the alert for the crouching Indian foe, who came when least expected. The country northwest of the Ohio River was then a part of the British province of Quebec. Here and there in this Old Northwest, as we now call it, were small villages of French and half-breed fur traders, each village protected by a little log fort; some of these villages were garrisoned by a handful of British soldiers, and others only by French Canadians who were friendly to the English. Such were Vincennes, in what is now Indiana; Kaskaskia and Cahokia, in the Illinois country; Prairie du Chien and Green Bay, in Wisconsin; and Mackinac Island and Detroit, in Michigan. Detroit was the headquarters, where lived the British lieutenant governor of the Northwest, Henry Hamilton, a bold, brave, untiring, unscrupulous man.

Hamilton's chief business was to gather about him the Indians of the Northwest, and to excite in them hatred of the American settlers in Kentucky. In 1777, war parties sent out by him from Detroit, under cover of the forts of Vincennes, Kaskaskia, and Cahokia, swept Kentucky from end to end, and the whole American frontier was the scene of a frightful panic. The American backwoodsmen were ambushed, many of the blockhouse posts were burned, prisoners were subjected to nameless horrors, and it seemed as if pandemonium had broken loose. By the close of the year, such had been the rush of settlers back to their old homes, east of the mountains, that but five or six hundred frontiersmen remained in all Kentucky. Had the British and the Indians succeeded in driving back all of the settlers, they would have held the whole interior of the continent, and the American republic might never have been permitted to grow beyond the Alleghanies and the Blue Ridge; hemmed in to the Atlantic slope, this could never have become the great nation it is to-day.

Prominent among the defenders of Kentucky in 1777 was George Rogers Clark. He was but twenty-five years of age, had come from a good family in Virginia, and had a fair education for that day, but had been a wood rover from childhood. He was tall and commanding in person, a great hunter, and a backwoods land surveyor, such as Washington was. With chain and compass, ax and rifle, he had, in the employ of land speculators, wandered far and wide through the border region, knowing its trails, its forts, its mountain passes, and its aborigines better than he knew his books. Associated with him were Boone, Benjamin Logan, and others who were prominent among American border heroes.

Clark saw that the best way to defend Kentucky was to strike the enemy in their own country. Gaining permission from Patrick Henry, governor of Virginia, for Kentucky was then but a county of Virginia, and obtaining some small assistance in money, he raised, in 1778, a little army of a hundred fifty backwoodsmen, clad in buckskin and homespun, who came from the hunters' camps of the Alleghanies. The men collected at Pittsburg and Wheeling, and in flatboats cautiously descended the Ohio to the falls, where is now the city of Louisville. Here, on an island, they built a fort as a military base, and the strongest of the party pushed on down the river to the abandoned old French Fort Massac, ten miles below the mouth of the Tennessee, from which they marched overland, for a hundred twenty miles, to Kaskaskia in western Illinois.

Capturing Kaskaskia by surprise (July 4), and soon gaining the good will of the French there, Clark sent out messengers who easily won over the neighboring Cahokia; and very soon even Vincennes, on the Wabash River, sent in its submission. It was not long before Hamilton, at Detroit, heard the humiliating news. He at once sent out two French agents, Charles de Langlade and Charles Gautier, of Green Bay, to raise a large war party of Wisconsin Indians. They succeeded so well, that Hamilton set out from Detroit in October, to retake Vincennes. His force consisted of nearly two hundred whites (chiefly French) and three hundred Indians. Such were the obstacles to overcome in an unbroken wilderness, that he was seventy-one days in reaching his destination. Clark had left but two of his soldiers at Vincennes, and as their French allies at once surrendered, there was nothing to do but to give up the place.

Now came one of the most stirring deeds in our Western history. Clark, at Kaskaskia, soon learned of the loss of Vincennes; at the same time, it was told him that the greater part of Hamilton's expedition had disbanded for the winter, the lieutenant governor intending to launch a still larger war party against him in the spring. Thereupon Clark determined not to await an attack, but himself to make an attack on Hamilton, who had remained in charge of Vincennes.

The distance across country, from Kaskaskia to Vincennes, is about two hundred thirty miles. In summer it was a delightful region of alternating groves and prairies; in the dead of winter, it would afford fair traveling over the frozen plains and ice-bound rivers; but now, in February (1779), the weather had moderated, and great freshets had flooded the lowlands and meadows. The ground was boggy, and progress was slow and difficult; there were no tents, and the floods had driven away much of the game; and Clark and his officers were often taxed to their wits' ends to devise methods for keeping their hard-worked men in good spirits. Often they were obliged to wade in the icy water, for miles together, and to sleep at night in soaked clothes upon little brush-strewn hillocks, shivering with cold, and without food or fire.

But at last, after nearly three weeks of almost superhuman exertion and indescribable misery, Vincennes was reached. The British garrison was taken by surprise, but held out with obstinacy, and throughout the long moonlight night the battle raged with much fury. The log fort was on the top of a hill overlooking the little town; it was armed with several small cannon, but Clark's men had only their muskets. They were, however, served freely with ammunition by the French villagers; and, being expert marksmen, could hit the gunners by firing through the loopholes, so that by sunrise the garrison was sadly crippled. The fight continued throughout the following morning, and in the afternoon the British ran up the white flag. Hamilton and twenty-six of his fellows were sent as prisoners overland to Virginia.

Clark remained as master of the Northwest until the close of the Revolutionary War. The fact that the flag of the republic waved over Vincennes, Kaskaskia, and Cahokia when the war ended, had much to do with the decision of the peace commissioners to allow the United States to retain the country lying between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and the Great Lakes.

During the Revolution, none of the forts in Wisconsin were occupied by British soldiers, and they were allowed to tumble into decay. Wisconsin was, however, used as a recruiting ground for Indian allies. Not only did Langlade and Gautier raise a war party of Wisconsin Indians to help Hamilton in his expedition against Vincennes, but they were frequently in Wisconsin on similar business during the war. In 1779 Gautier led a party of Wisconsin Indians to Peoria, in the Illinois country, where there was an old French fort which, it was thought, might fall into the hands of the Americans. Gautier burned this fort, and then hastily retreated because he found that Clark was making friends with all the Illinois Indians.

Clark's agents traded as far north as Portage, in Wisconsin. At Prairie du Chien they induced Linctot, a famous French fur trader, to join the Americans. Linctot put himself at the head of a party of five hundred French and half-breed horsemen, who were of much assistance to Clark in his various movements after the capture of Vincennes. Meanwhile another large party, chiefly of Indians, assembled at Prairie du Chien in the British cause, led by three French traders, Hesse, Du Charme, and Calvé. They raided the upper Mississippi valley, capturing provisions intended for the Americans, and making a futile attack on the Spanish village of St. Louis, which was thought to be assisting Clark.

Despite these military operations in Wisconsin, the English fur trade continued in full strength, with headquarters upon the Island of Mackinac, but with French agents and boatmen, whose principal dwelling places were at Green Bay and Prairie du Chien. Upon Lake Superior large canoes and bateaux were used; but upon Lake Michigan were three small sloops, the _Welcome_, the _Felicity_, and the _Archangel_, which carried supplies and furs for the traders, and made frequent cruises to see that the "Bostonians," as the French used to call the Americans, obtained no foothold upon the shore of the lake.

Just before the close of the war, the British commander at Mackinac Island, Captain Patrick Sinclair, held a council with the Indians, and for a small sum purchased for himself their claims to that island and to nearly all of the land now comprising Wisconsin. But the treaty of 1783, between the British and the Americans, did not recognize this purchase, and Sinclair found that he was no longer the owner of Wisconsin. It had become, largely through the valor of Clark, and the persistence of our treaty commissioners, a part of the territory of the United States.

THE RULE OF JUDGE RÉAUME

By the treaty of peace with Great Britain, in 1783, the country northwest of the Ohio River was declared to be a part of the territory of the United States; but it was many years before the Americans had anything more than a nominal control of Wisconsin, which was a part of this Northwestern region. The United States was at first unable to meet all of its obligations under this treaty; hence Great Britain kept possession of the old fur trade posts on the Upper Lakes, including Mackinac, of which Wisconsin was a "dependency." A British garrison was kept at Mackinac, thus controlling the fur trade of this district, but no troops were deemed necessary within Wisconsin itself.

To the few white inhabitants of the small fur trade villages of Green Bay and Prairie du Chien, there was slight evidence of any of these various changes in political ownership. Beyond the brief stay among them of Lieutenant Gorrell and his little band of redcoats, in the years 1761-63, the French and half-breeds of Wisconsin led much the same life as of old.

In 1780, an English fur trader, John Long, passed up the Fox River and down the Wisconsin, and bought up a great many furs in this region. Some years later he wrote a book about his travels, and from this we get a very good idea of life among the French and Indians of the Northwest. Long was at Green Bay for several days, and tells us that the houses there were covered with birch bark, and the rooms were decorated with bows and arrows, guns, and spears. There were in the village not over fifty whites, divided into six or seven families. The men were for the most part engaged as assistants to the two or three leading traders; they spent their winters in the woods, picking up furs at the Indian camps, and in summer cultivated their narrow strips of gardens which ran down to the river's edge. It mattered little to them who was their political master, so long as they were left to enjoy their simple lives in their own fashion.

To this primitive community there came one day, in 1803, a portly, pompous, bald headed little Frenchman, named Charles Réaume. Wisconsin was then a part of Indiana Territory, of which William Henry Harrison was governor. It was for the most part a wilderness; dense woods and tenantless prairies extended all the way from the narrow clearing at Green Bay to the little settlement at Prairie du Chien. There were small clearings at Portage, Milwaukee, and one or two other fur trading posts. There was no civil government here, and the few white people in all this vast stretch of country practically made their own laws, each man being judge and jury for himself, so long as he did not interfere with other people's rights.

Réaume bore a commission from Governor Harrison, appointing him justice of the peace at Green Bay, which meant nearly all of the country west of Lake Michigan. Thus "Judge Réaume," as he was called, was the only civil officer in Wisconsin, and although apparently never reappointed, he retained this distinction by popular consent until after the War of 1812-15; indeed, for several years after that, he was the principal officer of justice in these parts.