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A Half Century of Conflict, Volume II

F >> Francis Parkman >> A Half Century of Conflict, Volume II




As his own resources were of the smallest, he took a number of associates
on conditions most unfavorable to himself. Among them they raised money
enough to begin the enterprise, and on the 8th of June, 1731, La Vérendrye
and three of his sons, together with his nephew, La Jemeraye, the Jesuit
Messager, and a party of Canadians, set out from Montreal. It was late in
August before they reached the great portage of Lake Superior, which led
across the height of land separating the waters of that lake from those
flowing to Lake Winnipeg. The way was long and difficult. The men, who had
perhaps been tampered with, mutinied, and refused to go farther. [Footnote:
_Mémoire du Sieur de la Vérendrye du Sujet des Etablissements pour
parvenir a la Découverte de la Mer de l'Ouest,_ in Margry, VI. 585.] Some of
them, with much ado, consented at last to proceed, and, under the lead of
La Jemeraye, made their way by an intricate and broken chain of lakes and
streams to Rainy Lake, where they built a fort and called it Fort St.
Pierre. La Vérendrye was forced to winter with the rest of the party at the
river Kaministiguia, not far from the great portage. Here months were lost,
during which a crew of useless mutineers had to be fed and paid; and it was
not till the next June that he could get them again into motion towards
Lake Winnipeg.

This ominous beginning was followed by a train of disasters. His associates
abandoned him; the merchants on whom he depended for supplies would not
send them, and he found himself, in his own words "destitute of
everything." His nephew, La Jemeraye, died. The Jesuit Auneau, bent on
returning to Michillimackinac, set out with La Vérendrye's eldest son and a
party of twenty Canadians. A few days later, they were all found on an
island in the Lake of the Woods, murdered and mangled by the Sioux.
[Footnote: _Beauharnois au Ministre, 14 Oct. 1736; Relation du Massacre
au Lac des Bois, en Juin, 1736; Journal de la Vérendrye, joint à la lettre
de M. de Beauharnois du ---- Oct. 1737_.] The Assinniboins and
Cristineaux, mortal foes of that fierce people, offered to join the French
and avenge the butchery; but a war with the Sioux would have ruined La
Vérendrye's plans of discovery, and exposed to torture and death the French
traders in their country. Therefore he restrained himself and declined the
proffered aid, at the risk of incurring the contempt of those who offered
it.

Beauharnois twice appealed to the court to give La Vérendrye some little
aid, urging that he was at the end of his resources, and that a grant of
30,000 francs, or 6,000 dollars, would enable him to find a way to the
Pacific. All help was refused, but La Vérendrye was told that he might let
out his forts to other traders, and so raise means to pursue the discovery.

In 1740 he went for the third time to Montreal, where, instead of aid, he
found a lawsuit. "In spite," he says, "of the derangement of my affairs,
the envy and jealousy of various persons impelled them to write letters to
the court insinuating that I thought of nothing but making my fortune. If
more than forty thousand livres of debt which I have on my shoulders are an
advantage, then I can flatter myself that I am very rich. In all my
misfortunes, I have the consolation of seeing that M. de Beauharnois enters
into my views, recognizes the uprightness of my intentions, and does me
justice in spite of opposition." [Footnote: Mémoire du Sieur de la
Vérendrye au sujet des Etablissements pour parvenir à la Découverte de la
Mer de l'Quest.]

Meanwhile, under all his difficulties, he had explored a vast region
hitherto unknown, diverted a great and lucrative fur-trade from the English
at Hudson Bay, and secured possession of it by six fortified posts,--Fort
St. Pierre, on Rainy Lake; Fort St. Charles, on the Lake of the Woods; Fort
Maurepas, at the mouth of the river Winnipeg; Fort Bourbon, on the eastern
side of Lake Winnipeg; Fort La Reine, on the Assinniboin; Fort Dauphin, on
Lake Manitoba. Besides these he built another post, called Fort Rouge, on
the site of the city of Winnipeg; and, some time after, another, at the
mouth of the River Poskoiac, or Saskatchawan, neither of which, however,
was long occupied. These various forts were only stockade works flanked
with block-houses; but the difficulty of building and maintaining them in
this remote wilderness was incalculable. [Footnote: _Mémoire en abrégé de
la Carte qui représente les Etablissements faits par le Sieur de la
Vérendrye et ses Enfants_ (Margry, VI. 616); _Carte des Nouvelles
Découvertes dans l'Ouest du Canada dressée sur les Mémoires de Mr. de la
Vérandrie et donnée au Dépôt de la Marine par M. de la Galissonnière,_
1750; Bellin, _Remarques surla Carte de l'Amérique,_ 1755;
Bougainville, _Mémoire sur l'Etat de la Nouvelle France, _1757.
Most of La Vérendrye's forts were standing during the Seven Years' War, and
were known collectively as _Postes de la Mer de l'Ouest_.]

He had inquired on all sides for the Pacific. The Assinniboins could tell
him nothing. Nor could any information be expected from them, since their
relatives and mortal enemies, the Sioux, barred their way to the West. The
Cristineaux were equally ignorant; but they supplied the place of knowledge
by invention, and drew maps, some of which seem to have been made with no
other intention than that of amusing themselves by imposing on the
inquirer. They also declared that some of their number had gone down a
river called White River, or River of the West, where they found a plant
that shed drops like blood, and saw serpents of prodigious size. They said
further that on the lower part of this river were walled towns, where dwelt
white men who had knives, hatchets, and cloth, but no firearms. [Footnote:
_Journal de la Vérendrye joint à la Lettre de M. de Beauharnois du ----
Oct. 1737_.]

Both Assinniboins and Cristineaux declared that there was a distant tribe
on the Missouri, called Mantannes (Mandans), who knew the way to the
Western Sea, and would guide him to it. Lured by this assurance, and
feeling that he had sufficiently secured his position to enable him to
begin his Western exploration, La Vérendrye left Fort La Reine in October,
1738, with twenty men, and pushed up the River Assinniboin till its rapids
and shallows threatened his bark canoes with destruction. Then, with a band
of Assinniboin Indians who had joined him, he struck across the prairie for
the Mandans, his Indian companions hunting buffalo on the way. They
approached the first Mandan village on the afternoon of the 3d of December,
displaying a French flag and firing three volleys as a salute. The whole
population poured out to see the marvellous visitors, who were conducted
through the staring crowd to the lodge of the principal chief,--a capacious
structure so thronged with the naked and greasy savages that the Frenchmen
were half smothered. What was worse, they lost the bag that held all their
presents for the Mandans, which was snatched away in the confusion, and
hidden in one of the _caches_, called cellars by La Vérendrye, of
which the place was full. The chief seemed much discomposed at this mishap,
and explained it by saying that there were many rascals in the village.
The loss was serious, since without the presents nothing could be done. Nor
was this all; for in the morning La Vérendrye missed his interpreter, and
was told that he had fallen in love with an Assinniboin girl and gone off
in pursuit of her. The French were now without any means of communicating
with the Mandans, from whom, however, before the disappearance of the
interpreter, they had already received a variety of questionable
information, chiefly touching white men cased in iron who were said to live
on the river below at the distance of a whole summer's journey. As they
were impervious to arrows,--so the story ran,--it was necessary to shoot
their horses, after which, being too heavy to run, they were easily caught.
This was probably suggested by the armor of the Spaniards, who had more
than once made incursions as far as the lower Missouri; but the narrators
drew on their imagination for various additional particulars.

The Mandans seem to have much declined in numbers during the century that
followed this visit of La Vérendrye. He says that they had six villages on
or near the Missouri, of which the one seen by him was the smallest, though
he thinks that it contained a hundred and thirty houses. [Footnote:
_Journal de la Vérendrye_, 1738,1739. This journal, which is
ill-written and sometimes obscure, is printed in Brymner, _Report on
Canadian Archives_, 1889.] As each of these large structures held a
number of families, the population must have been considerable. Yet when
Prince Maximilian visited the Mandans in 1833, he found only two villages,
containing jointly two hundred and forty warriors and a total population of
about a thousand souls. Without having seen the statements of La Vérendrye,
he speaks of the population as greatly reduced by wars and the
small-pox,--a disease which a few years later nearly exterminated the
tribe. [Footnote: Le Prince Maximilien de Wied-Neuwied, _Voyage dans
l'Intérieur de l'Amérique du Nord_, II. 371, 372 (Paris, 1843). When
Captains Lewis and Clark visited the Mandans in 1804, they found them in
two villages, with about three hundred and fifty warriors. They report
that, about forty years before, they lived in nine villages, the ruins of
which the explorers saw about eighty miles below the two villages then
occupied by the tribe. The Mandans had moved up the river in consequence of
the persecutions of the Sioux and the small-pox, which had made great havoc
among them. _Expedition of Lewis and Clark_, I. 129 (ed. Philadelphia,
1814).These nine villages seem to have been above Cannon-ball River, a
tributary of the Missouri.]

La Vérendrye represents the six villages as surrounded with ditches and
stockades, flanked by a sort of bastion,--defences which, he says, had
nothing savage in their construction. In later times the fortifications
were of a much ruder kind, though Maximilian represents them as having
pointed salients to serve as bastions. La Vérendrye mentions some peculiar
customs of the Mandans which answer exactly to those described by more
recent observers.

He had intended to winter with the tribe; but the loss of the presents and
the interpreter made it useless to stay, and leaving two men in the village
to learn the language, he began his return to Fort La Reine. "I was very
ill," he writes, "but hoped to get better on the way. The reverse was the
case, for it was the depth of winter. It would be impossible to suffer more
than I did. It seemed that nothing but death could release us from such
miseries." He reached Fort La Reine on the 11th of February, 1739.

His iron constitution seems to have been severely shaken; but he had sons
worthy of their father. The two men left among the Mandans appeared at Fort
La Reine in September. They reported that they had been well treated, and
that their hosts had parted from them with regret. They also declared that
at the end of spring several Indian tribes, all well supplied with horses,
had come, as was their yearly custom, to the Mandan villages to barter
embroidered buffalo hides and other skins for corn and beans; that they had
encamped, to the number of two hundred lodges, on the farther side of the
Missouri, and that among them was a band said to have come from a distant
country towards the sunset, where there were white men who lived in houses
built of bricks and stones.

The two Frenchmen crossed over to the camp of these Western strangers,
among whom they found a chief who spoke, or professed to speak, the
language of the mysterious white men, which to the two Frenchmen was
unintelligible. Fortunately, he also spoke the language of the Mandans, of
which the Frenchmen had learned a little during their stay, and hence were
able to gather that the white men in question had beards, and that they
prayed to the Master of Life in great houses, built for the purpose,
holding books, the leaves of which were like husks of Indian corn, singing
together and repeating _Jésus, Marie_. The chief gave many other
particulars, which seemed to show that he had been in contact with
Spaniards,--probably those of California; for he described their houses as
standing near the great lake, of which the water rises and falls and is not
fit to drink. He invited the two Frenchmen to go with him to this strange
country, saying that it could be reached before winter, though a wide
circuit must be made, to avoid a fierce and dangerous tribe called Snake
Indians (_Gens du Serpent_). [Footnote: _Journal du Sieur de la
Vérendrye_, 1740, in Archives de la Marine.]

On hearing this story, La Vérendrye sent his eldest son, Pierre, to pursue
the discovery with two men, ordering him to hire guides among the Mandans
and make his way to the Western Sea. But no guides were to be found, and in
the next summer the young man returned from his bootless errand.
[Footnote: _Mémoire du Sieur de la Vérendrye, joint à sa lettre du 31
Oct. 1744_]

Undaunted by this failure, Pierre set out again in the next spring, 1742,
with his younger brother, the Chevalier de la Vérendrye. Accompanied only
by two Canadians, they left Port La Reine on the 29th of April, and
following, no doubt, the route of the Assinniboin and Mouse River, reached
the chief village of the Mandans in about three weeks.

Here they found themselves the welcome guests of this singularly
interesting tribe, ruined by the small-pox nearly half a century ago, but
preserved to memory by the skilful pencil of the artist Charles Bodmer, and
the brush of the painter George Catlin, both of whom saw them at a time
when they were little changed in habits and manners since the visit of the
brothers La Vérendrye. [Footnote: Prince Maximilian spent the winter of
1832-33 near the Mandan villages. His artist, with the instinct of genius,
seized the characteristics of the wild life before him, and rendered them
with admirable vigor and truth. Catlin spent a considerable time among the
Mandans soon after the visit of Prince Maximilian, and had unusual
opportunities of studying them. He was an indifferent painter, a shallow
observer, and a garrulous and windy writer; yet his enthusiastic industry
is beyond praise, and his pictures are invaluable as faithful reflections
of aspects of Indian life which are gone forever.]

[Footnote: Beauharnois calls the Mandans _Blancs Barbus_, and says
that they have been hitherto unknown. _Beauharnois au Ministre, 14
Août_, 1739. The name Mantannes, or Mandans, is that given them by the
Assinniboins.]

Thus, though the report of the two brothers is too concise and brief, we
know what they saw when they entered the central area, or public square, of
the village. Around stood the Mandan lodges, looking like round flattened
hillocks of earth, forty or fifty feet wide. On examination they proved to
be framed of strong posts and poles, covered with a thick matting of
intertwined willow-branches, over which was laid a bed of well-compacted
clay or earth two or three feet thick. This heavy roof was supported by
strong interior posts. [Footnote: The Minnetarees and other tribes of the
Missouri built their lodges in a similar way.] The open place which the
dwellings enclosed served for games, dances, and the ghastly religious or
magical ceremonies practised by the tribe. Among the other structures was
the sacred "medicine lodge" distinguished by three or four tall poles
planted before it, each surmounted by an effigy looking much like a
scarecrow, and meant as an offering to the spirits.

If the two travellers had been less sparing of words, they would doubtless
have told us that as they entered the village square the flattened earthen
domes that surrounded it were thronged with squaws and children,--for this
was always the case on occasions of public interest,--and that they were
forced to undergo a merciless series of feasts in the lodges of the chiefs.
Here, seated by the sunken hearth in the middle, under the large hole in
the roof that served both for window and chimney, they could study at their
ease the domestic economy of their entertainers. Each lodge held a
_gens_, or family connection, whose beds of raw buffalo hide,
stretched on poles, were ranged around the circumference of the building,
while by each stood a post on which hung shields, lances, bows, quivers,
medicine-bags, and masks formed of the skin of a buffalo's head, with the
horns attached, to be used in the magic buffalo dance.

Every day had its sports to relieve the monotony of savage existence, the
game of the stick and the rolling ring, the archery practice of boys,
horse-racing on the neighboring prairie, and incessant games of chance;
while every evening, in contrast to these gayeties, the long, dismal wail
of women rose from the adjacent cemetery, where the dead of the village,
sewn fast in buffalo hides, lay on scaffolds above the reach of wolves.

The Mandans did not know the way to the Pacific, but they told the brothers
that they expected a speedy visit from a tribe or band called Horse
Indians, who could guide them thither. It is impossible to identify this
people with any certainty. [Footnote: The Cheyennes have a tradition that
they were the first tribe of this region to have horses. This may perhaps
justify a conjecture that the northern division of this brave and warlike
people were the Horse Indians of La Vérendrye; though an Indian tradition,
unless backed by well-established facts, can never be accepted as
substantial evidence.] The two travellers waited for them in vain till
after midsummer, and then, as the season was too far advanced for longer
delay, they hired two Mandans to conduct them to their customary haunts.

They set out on horseback, their scanty baggage and their stock of presents
being no doubt carried by pack-animals. Their general course was
west-southwest, with the Black Hills at a distance on their left, and the
upper Missouri on their right. The country was a rolling prairie, well
covered for the most part with grass, and watered by small alkaline streams
creeping towards the Missouri with an opaque, whitish current. Except along
the watercourses, there was little or no wood. "I noticed," says the
Chevalier de la Vérendrye, "earths of different colors, blue, green, red,
or black, white as chalk, or yellowish like ochre." This was probably in
the "bad lands" of the Little Missouri, where these colored earths form a
conspicuous feature in the bare and barren bluffs, carved into fantastic
shapes by the storms. [Footnote: A similar phenomenon occurs farther west
on the face of the perpendicular bluffs that, in one place, border the
valley of the river Rosebud.]

For twenty days the travellers saw no human being, so scanty was the
population of these plains. Game, however, was abundant. Deer sprang from
the tall, reedy grass of the river bottoms; buffalo tramped by in ponderous
columns, or dotted the swells of the distant prairie with their grazing
thousands; antelope approached, with the curiosity of their species, to
gaze at the passing horsemen, then fled like the wind; and as they neared
the broken uplands towards the Yellowstone, they saw troops of elk and
flocks of mountain-sheep. Sometimes, for miles together, the dry plain was
studded thick with the earthen mounds that marked the burrows of the
curious marmots, called prairie-dogs, from their squeaking bark. Wolves,
white and gray, howled about the camp at night, and their cousin, the
coyote, seated in the dusk of evening upright on the grass, with nose
turned to the sky, saluted them with a complication of yelpings, as if a
score of petulant voices were pouring together from the throat of one small
beast.

On the 11th of August, after a march of about three weeks, the brothers
reached a hill, or group of hills, apparently west of the Little Missouri,
and perhaps a part of the Powder River Range. It was here that they hoped
to find the Horse Indians, but nobody was to be seen. Arming themselves
with patience, they built a hut, made fires to attract by the smoke any
Indians roaming near, and went every day to the tops of the hills to
reconnoitre. At length, on the 14th of September, they descried a spire of
smoke on the distant prairie.

One of their Mandan guides had left them and gone back to his village. The
other, with one of the Frenchmen, went towards the smoke, and found a camp
of Indians, whom the journal calls Les Beaux Hommes, and who were probably
Crows, or Apsaroka, a tribe remarkable for stature and symmetry, who long
claimed that region as their own. They treated the visitors well, and sent
for the other Frenchmen to come to their lodges, where they were received
with great rejoicing. The remaining Mandan, however, became
frightened,--for the Beaux Hommes were enemies of his tribe,--and he soon
followed his companion on his solitary march homeward.

The brothers remained twenty-one days in the camp of the Beaux Hommes, much
perplexed for want of an interpreter. The tribes of the plains have in
common a system of signs by which they communicate with each other, and it
is likely that the brothers had learned it from the Sioux or Assinniboins,
with whom they had been in familiar intercourse. By this or some other
means they made their hosts understand that they wished to find the Horse
Indians; and the Beaux Hommes, being soothed by presents, offered some of
their young men as guides. They set out on the 9th of October, following a
south-southwest course. [Footnote: _Journal du Voyage fait par le
Chevalier de la Vérendrye en 1742._ The copy before me is from the
original in the Depot des Cartes de la Marine. A duplicate, in the Archives
des Affaires Etrangères, is printed by Margry. It gives the above date as
November 9th instead of October 9th. The context shows the latter to be
correct.]

In two days they met a band of Indians, called by them the Little Foxes,
and on the 15th and 17th two villages of another unrecognizable horde,
named Pioya. From La Vérendrye's time to our own, this name "villages" has
always been given to the encampments of the wandering people of the plains.
All these nomadic communities joined them, and they moved together
southward, till they reached at last the lodges of the long-sought Horse
Indians. They found them in the extremity of distress and terror. Their
camp resounded with howls and wailings; and not without cause, for the
Snakes, or Shoshones,--a formidable people living farther westward,--had
lately destroyed most of their tribe. The Snakes were the terror of that
country. The brothers were told that the year before they had destroyed
seventeen villages, killing the warriors and old women, and carrying off
the young women and children as slaves.

None of the Horse Indians had ever seen the Pacific; but they knew a people
called Gens de l'Arc, or Bow Indians, who, as they said, had traded not far
from it. To the Bow Indians, therefore, the brothers resolved to go, and by
dint of gifts and promises they persuaded their hosts to show them the way.
After marching southwestward for several days, they saw the distant prairie
covered with the pointed buffalo-skin lodges of a great Indian camp. It was
that of the Bow Indians, who may have been one of the bands of the western
Sioux,--the predominant race in this region. Few or none of them could ever
have seen a white man, and we may imagine their amazement at the arrival of
the strangers, who, followed by staring crowds, were conducted to the lodge
of the chief. "Thus far," says La Vérendrye, "we had been well received in
all the villages we had passed; but this was nothing compared with the
courteous manners of the great chief of the Bow Indians, who, unlike the
others, was not self-interested in the least, and who took excellent care
of everything belonging to us."

The first inquiry of the travellers was for the Pacific; but neither the
chief nor his tribesmen knew anything of it, except what they had heard
from Snake prisoners taken in war. The Frenchmen were surprised at the
extent of the camp, which consisted of many separate bands. The chief
explained that they had been summoned from far and near for a grand
war-party against that common foe of all,--the Snakes. [Footnote: The
enmity between the Sioux and the Snakes lasted to our own time. When the
writer lived among the western Sioux, one of their chiefs organized a
war-party against the Snakes, and numerous bands came to join the
expedition from a distance in some cases of three hundred miles. Quarrels
broke out among them, and the scheme was ruined.] In fact, the camp
resounded with war-songs and war-dances. "Come with us," said their host;
"we are going towards the mountains, where you can see the great water that
you are looking for."

At length the camp broke up. The squaws took down the lodges, and the march
began over prairies dreary and brown with the withering touch of autumn.
The spectacle was such as men still young have seen in these Western lands,
but which no man will see again. The vast plain swarmed with the moving
multitude. The tribes of the Missouri and the Yellowstone had by this time
abundance of horses, the best of which were used for war and hunting, and
the others as beasts of burden. These last were equipped in a peculiar
manner. Several of the long poles used to frame the teepees, or lodges,
were secured by one end to each side of a rude saddle, while the other end
trailed on the ground. Crossbars lashed to the poles just behind the horse
kept them three or four feet apart, and formed a firm support, on which was
laid, compactly folded, the buffalo-skin covering of the lodge. On this,
again, sat a mother with her young family, sometimes stowed for safety in a
large open willow basket, with the occasional addition of some domestic
pet,--such as a tame raven, a puppy, or even a small bear cub. Other horses
were laden in the same manner with wooden bowls, stone hammers, and other
utensils, along with stores of dried buffalo-meat packed in cases of
rawhide whitened and painted. Many of the innumerable dogs--whose manners
and appearance strongly suggested their relatives the wolves, to whom,
however, they bore a mortal grudge--were equipped in a similar way, with
shorter poles and lighter loads. Bands of naked boys, noisy and restless,
roamed the prairie, practising their bows and arrows on any small animal
they might find. Gay young squaws--adorned on each cheek with a spot of
ochre or red clay, and arrayed in tunics of fringed buckskin embroidered
with porcupine quills--were mounted on ponies, astride like men; while lean
and tattered hags--the drudges of the tribe, unkempt and hideous--scolded
the lagging horses, or screeched at the disorderly dogs, with voices not
unlike the yell of the great horned owl. Most of the warriors were on
horseback, armed with round, white shields of bull-hide, feathered lances,
war-clubs, bows, and quivers filled with stone-headed arrows; while a few
of the elders, wrapped in robes of buffalo-hide, stalked along in groups
with a stately air, chatting, laughing, and exchanging unseemly jokes.
[Footnote: The above descriptive particulars are drawn from repeated
observation of similar scenes at a time when the primitive condition of
these tribes was essentially unchanged, though with the difference that the
concourse of savages counted by hundreds, and not by thousands.]

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