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The Foxes' Fort - 1730
(Due to length divided here into four
parts)
Faye, Stanley in:Journal of the Illinois
State Historical Society, vol. 28,
nos. 2-4, pp. 123-163.
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THE FOXES' FORT - 1730
By
STANLEY FAYE
Starved Rock towers above the Illinois River, recalling the ambition of La Salle, the work of La Salle's lieutenant Tonti, the boyhood of Tonti's cousin Deliette. Nearly five miles toward the south, beyond oak forest and cultivated fields, grassland thrusts itself on southward between two ravines. From the southern edge of that promontory open woodland drops down to the stream that Illinois Indians called Aramoni, or Vermilion.
Hereabouts Henri de Tonti, alone, fought a battle of wits with a horde of Iroquois raiders. Hereabouts the Shawnee allies built a fort that should guard the Rock and the ambition of La Salle. Here a gully and one of many mounds recall today how a French governor of Canada once stumbled through embarrassment in pursuit of his own ambition.
From the Rock into Canada La Salle's canoes in the springtime carried beaverskins. Nineteen English miles eastward between bluffs and sandstone cliffs of the Illinois, boatmen would urge canoes to the head of the rapids. Beyond another thirteen miles of muddy banks and slopes of forest and of meadow the creek still called Nettle or the river called likewise Mazon invited them to a camping place. Nine miles of next morning's voyage through a smiling valley brought them up to the Kankakee forks of the river. So cargoes of peltry bound to Montreal might pass between those latter twenty-two miles of hillside enclosing the land of Mazon, the land of the riverside nettle and dogbane that yielded massane, which is Canada hemp.1
The sieur de La Salle had accredited to Mazon "the most beautiful landscape in the world." Those wooded meadows, as well as the entire Grand Prairie of which they formed a northern cove, he wished to hold within his seigniory of Illinois. But King Louis XIV decreed in the year 1684 that La Salle's country of the Illinois people should mount the river northward and eastward only to include Fort St. Louis atop the Rock.2
In Tonti's time the Illinois people went with their French officers to live in the Mississippi's bottomland below their river's mouth. Only the Peoria tribes refused to go. Outlawed by Quebec and by Louisiana, the Peoria kept to their own river, at Tonti's newer Fort St. Louis near the Narrows of Peoria Lake to be known as the Illinois of the Narrows, at La Salle's old Fort St. Louis to be known as the Illinois of the Rock. By service lent at Detroit in 1712 against another outlaw tribe, the Foxes, the Illinois of the Rock won back Canadian favor. Tonti's cousin Deliette, no longer now a boy, came to govern the Peoria again for Canada.3
The Rock and its prairies were of Canada until 1717. Then King Louis XV detached the country of the Illinois from his upper colony and gave it with its Indians and fur trade to his lower colony. Deliette soon transferred his Illinois headquarters to Fort Chartres in the Mississippi bottom. The Rock in the wilderness marked a boundary point between Canada and Louisiana, between the country of the Peoria on the south and, on the northwest, the prairies of outlaw Kickapoo and Mascoutens.4
Now arose boundary disputes. Canada claimed southward along both sides of the Mississippi including the Kickapoo prairies to the River Des Moines. In the forests along the Wabash she claimed the fur trade of Miami tribes to the Ohio. Like an enemy salient the Grand Prairie and the river of Illinois Peoria cut apart the eastern from the western hunting grounds of tribes that Canada desired.5
The upper colony made good her claim on the east. From within a stockade in the forest of the St. Joseph River (Niles, Mich.) successive district commanders governed the Miami country. Profits of their commerce flowed through their sub-post at Fort Miami (Ft. Wayne, Ind.) and another one where a cove of Grand Prairie opened almost into the Wabash among the Wea tribe of the Miami people (La Fayette, Ind.).6
Louisiana raised protest against Canadian title to the Wabash. Protest flourished without effect. Then Louisiana lured away from Canadian service the young officer who commanded for Fort St. Joseph at the Wea post. With a Louisianan lieutenancy and extra pay in addition, Second-Ensign de Vincennes removed himself down river below the terre-haute to command the new Post Vincennes, which Louisiana set up among the Miami Piankeshaw tribe. Despite protest now from Quebec he gave the Wabash fur trade to the India Company, monopolist of commerce in Louisiana. Thus in the season of 1726-27 the salient of the south spread wide.7
Canada had been trying meanwhile to reduce that salient by luring away the Peoria to Canadian forests, to Canadian
(page 126) Map: French Posts in the Illinois Country and Neighboring Territory, 1730. (illeg. copy)
(page 127) fur trade, and to Canadian service against the outlaw nation who gave a name to the Fox River of Wisconsin. Like the Iroquois in earlier days those Foxes were enemies of Frenchmen and red men alike. With their southwestern allies, the Kickapoo and Mascoutens, they raided and murdered both in Canada and in Illinois. The veteran Canadian woodsman Robert Grosson de St. Ange, traveling from Fort St. Joseph to New Orleans in 1721, learned that Foxes had destroyed old Fort St. Louis atop the Rock and that Peoria in repayment had burned prisoners alive there. Next year the Foxes drove the Peoria from Fort St. Louis of the Narrows.8
Many Illinois of the Narrows went into exile among Illinois cousins, the Cahokia, on the Mississippi (East St. Louis, Ill.). Others joined with the Illinois of the Rock to form a winter's town on their own river well below Peoria Lake.9 Canada invited the Peoria to hunting grounds less insecure from attack by outlaws. Louisiana protested against this attempted theft of her militiamen and hunters.
The Canadian invitation came from the forest of Green Bay. Like the commandant of Fort St. Joseph in the Miami country, the commandant of the Bay had bought a trade concession among the Foxes' Indian neighbors in Wisconsin.10 To bring even the timid Peoria within his district would have strengthened the officer's military position. To bring their fur trade to his traders would have put money into his pocket.
Cause existed for complaint against other acts of Canadians. In competition with Louisiana's Fort Chartres were the Bay and Fort St. Joseph. Forbidden brandy went on sale there. Canadian bushrangers sold ammunition for the (page 128) muskets of unfriendly tribesmen. Conditions at Fort St. Joseph may have been bettered in 1725 after the arrival of a new commandant, Lieutenant Nicolas-Antoine Coulon de Villiers. Traders of Canada at the Bay, eager for peltries, continued to spread slander among Wisconsin tribes against the French of Fort Chartres.11
Conditions everywhere in Canada were bettered in 1726 by the coming of a new Governor to Quebec, the Marquis de Beauharnois. With him came a new Intendant to direct the royal monopoly of Canadian fur trade. Soon a new officer commanded at the Bay. Two reconciled colonies joined forces in 1728 against Fox warriors, but their expedition caused only a renewal of intercolonial jealousy. The Foxes lived on, undisciplined.12
Discipline came by chance in the following year. The Kickapoo and Mascoutens, whose hundred and fifty warriors on the Mississippi were unwilling allies of the Foxes, made peace in the spring with the commandant Deliette at Fort Chartres. At the winter's town they made peace with the Peoria of the Rock in order that three nations might "take measures together to avenge themselves on this common enemy."13
Later in the year they made peace with the Governor of Quebec. The Governor invited them to alliance with the forest tribes of his Fort St. Joseph. He gave them Mazon as a hunting ground to guard against an enemy. There and west of the Chicago portage, beyond the river that had been the Mascoutens' own in the days of La Salle,14 they lit their (page 129) fires again within the district that Lieutenant de Villiers commanded.15
Like the commandant of the Bay, the commandant of the St. Joseph had bought the trade concession of his district.16 One year after Lieutenant de Villiers' coming to the west, Fort Chartres had robbed him of his Wea and the profits of the Wabash. Now Quebec made good his loss by giving him the Kickapoo and Mascoutens and by giving him also, after a fashion, a tribe from Illinois.
How might a tribe of the Illinois people lend even part allegiance to Canada? Deliette on the distant Mississippi could have answered that question. For occupation of the lower Wabash his commercial rival on the St. Joseph had paid Louisiana back by occupying the upper Illinois. By means of a trick that kept Louisiana from official complaint, Canada had reduced the southern salient.
But the veteran Deliette would answer no question. Deliette was dead.
The elders of the Illinois tribes had been in their boyhood the boyhood comrades of Henri de Tonti's cousin. Deliette was the one French officer to whom since the death of Tonti the Peoria had deferred. In the Kickapoo treaty he did his last service to the Illinois. With Deliette in mid-summer of 1729 died the influence that had held the Peoria of the river in duty to Louisiana. The Illinois of the Rock welcomed a Canadian offer of alliance and of annexation.
When it seemed later to be to his own advantage Governor de Beauharnois confessed that he had performed such an act of annexation in 1731. Still later, under pressure, he confessed that the act had been of 1730. Events of that last mentioned year and their resultant reports make it plain that the first step in the act was taken as early as 1729. The pres- (page 130) ence of an Illinois tribe already in duty to Canada at the Rock did bring about in 1730 a conspiracy of Canadian officers led by the Governor himself. Official reports to be sent to France were tortured into ambiguity. Two honest reports appear to have been suppressed.
The transmitted reports and the situation in which they were made reveal that the Illinois of the Rock from their winter's town sent a petition to Canada in 1729. Canada accepted, provisionally, the allegiance of fifty Peoria warriors and their families and included them in the district of Fort St. Joseph. To prevent official complaint from the south they were settled at their own old home, the Rock, adjoining Maxon and Grand Prairie but within the wilderness of Louisiana.
Canada lacked authority for detaching a tribe and its hunting grounds and peltries from subjection to Louisiana and to the India Company. The King only recently had desired Governor de Beauharnois to take no steps in regard to any savage people without royal consent. However, besides repairing an injury to Canadian commerce and to Fort St. Joseph's income, the presence of Peoria warriors at the Rock gave military advantage to both colonies against the Foxes.
Deserted by their allies, unwilling to surrender to the French, the Foxes had revived a thirty-year-old plan of passing eastward to alliance with the Iroquois. Their route around the foot of Lake Michigan would carry them through the home lands of Kickapoo, Mascoutens, and Fort St. Joseph's Potawatomi, or through Mazon, or through the country of the Rock, and onward through the district of Fort St. Joseph, across Grand Prairie, past St. Joseph's ungarrisoned Wea post, across the Wabash, and to safety in the forest. Lieutenant de Villiers, commanding officially all that district except the Rock, had orders from Quebec17 to (page 131) be on the alert and to hold his savages ready for an expedition.
Comparison of Canadian reports reconstructs the strategy that a Canadian Governor and his officers made ready against the Fox nation for the summer of 1730. The migrants on their eastward journey could ford the shallow River Checagou (modern Desplaines), but they could ford the deeper Illinois only at or above the Rock. The Potawatomi, Kickapoo, and Mascoutens, without offering to attack, would bar the Canadian fords as far down river as Mazon.18
To the Rock, just within the Illinois country, migration would turn its route. Peoria at the Rock would call Illinois kinsmen from the Mississippi to repel invasion of Illinois lands. The Louisianan commandant whom those of the Rock had abandoned would not undertake so long a journey.
One day's march beyond the ruined old Fort St. Louis would lead Fox fugitives to brooks that flow to the River Mazon. Thereabouts the Illinois of the Rock and the allies of the Hemp would hold them fast. The commandant of Fort. St. Joseph would bring or send down his Miami warriors. The influence of those latter would balance such influence as the Foxes might hold among the Miami Wea of the Wabash. Unofficial reinforcement from the Mississippi would assure Canadian victory within limits that Canadians could claim as their own.
To gain assurance in advance the early presence of a Canadian Peoria tribe was needed at the Rock. How well the Peoria understood this is shown by the words with which later they called upon Governor de Beauharnois to treat them not as Louisianans or as conditional allies, but "as his other children."19
The Fox nation began the campaign of 1730 by quitting the Fox River of Wisconsin about the first of June. So by only a few days they escaped battle with an expedition made up, at much cost to the government and without authority from the Governor, by Canadian officers on the straits of Mackinac. Early in July the report of failure in Wisconsin came to Quebec.20
Further expense should be avoided, in view of the strategy prepared. So Governor de Beauharnois sent out what he represented as a circular letter to officers in command of posts.
That circular directed itself pointedly only to Fort St. Joseph, where lived the tribe of Sauk. It forbade commandants and garrisons to go on such expeditions without orders from Quebec. It forbade the delivery of muskets and ammunition in any trade with the Foxes or with their former friends, among whom the Sauk won special mention. It forbade any treaty with the Foxes. It urged commandants to incite loyal Indians to expeditions against that enemy, and it ordered powder and shot to be issued free of charge for such a purpose.21
The order reached Fort St. Joseph well after August 10. It reached Fort Miami before August 20. Its earlier passage through Detroit is evident in a letter written there under date of August 22. On that date news had reached Detroit that such an expedition as the Governor had just forbidden had been planned to start out twelve days earlier from the St. Joseph River.22
Whatever the commandant of Detroit may have said
orally by messenger, in his report transmitting this news he wrote only what
the Governor might, without embarrass-
____________________________________
1 Pierre Margry, Dcouvertes et Etablissements des Franais (Paris, 1876-86; 6v.), II, 174; Illinois Historical Collections, XXIII, 306; General Hull's map in A. T. Andreas, History of Chicago (Chicago, 1884, 3 v.), I, 53; Major Long's map, Country drained by the Mississippi, eastern section, in volume of plates in Edwin James, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains (Philadelphia, 1823).
2 Harlan H. Barrows, Geography of the Middle Illinois Valley (Illinois State Geological Survey, Bulletin 15; Urbana, 1910), page 69; Charles O. Paullin, Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States (Washington, 1932), plate 3-A; Margry, II, 383.
3 Illinois State Historical Society, Transactions for 1901, pp. 41-51; Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections, XXXIII (550, 560-61); William Ingraham Kip, The Early Jesuit Missions (Albany, 1873), 215-16.
4 Clarence Walworth Alvord, The Illinois Country, 1673-1818 (Springfield, 1920), 157-58.
5Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVI, 394, 443.
6 Cf. Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 71, garrison of "Captain de Vivier." This is Lieutenant de Villiers; Captain du Vivier had died in 1714.
7 J. P. Dunn, Jr., Indiana (Boston and New York, 1888), 47-54; Canadian Archive Reports for 1904, appendix K, p. 11; Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVI, 394, 443, XVII, 29, 133.
8 Milo Milton Quaife, Chicago and the Old Northwest (Chicago, 1913), 63-64; Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVI, 454.
9 Apparently at or near Beardstown. Cf. Alvord, 161; Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 48-49, 52, 54; Smithsonian Institution, Annual Report for 1881, pp. 568-79.
10Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVI, 468.
11Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVI, 449; Bulletin de Recherches Historiques (Levis, Quebec, 1906), XII, 167; Alvord, 161-62.
12 Alvord, 163; Quaife, 65; Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 109.
13 E. B. O'Callaghan, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (Albany, 1853-58; 10v.), IX, 889, X, 1055; Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 54-55, 62; Jesuit Relations (Cleveland, 1900; 73 v.), LXVIII, _____ (illeg. copy).
14 Margry, II, 174, 187; Minet's map and Franquelin's maps (Karpinski Collection in Ayer Collection, Newberry Library).
15 Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections, XXXIV, 74; Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 101, 149, 222, 322.
16Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVI, 468, XVII, 131-32.
17Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 143.
18 John F. Steward, Lost Maramech and Earliest Chicago (Chicago, 1903), 373: ". . . les parrages du cost du nord-est." The plural parrages meant in eighteenth century French, like paraje in Spanish, a distant, indefinite site, place, district, region.
19Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 169-70.
20 Steward, 362-63, 366-67.
21Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 102, 143.
22Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 100-02.
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