Читать книгу The Book of the West - Howard Angus Kennedy - Страница 4

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ONE DAY a strange piece of news came to an Indian prairie camp. The men and women, squatting on the grass, and smoking their willow-bark, discussed the great news, and even the children stopped their play to listen and wonder.

A new kind of man had been seen, far away in the south,—a light-skinned man.

How did the news come? The scattered Indian tribes had little to do with each other, except when they fought, and in a fight they generally killed all the men they conquered who did not escape. But they often kept the women and made wives of them.

It may have been one of these women, captured by some raiding party in the south, who told the prairie Indians the story her tribe had heard in the same way from some tribe still farther south. The story was that a lot of these “white” men had come sailing across the big water in monstrous canoes with wings; once ashore, they had come riding over the country on great four-legged animals, as swift and terrible as buffalo, though not so shaggy. Nearly all the tribes had an old story about an agreeable fair-skinned god who had once lived among them and had promised to come back, so the newcomers were at first believed to be that god and his brothers. But they were not at all agreeable, for they took possession of the land and killed the Indians Indians Hear Strange News resisting them. They had terrible weapons,—tubes that breathed fire, and shining swords that cut off a head at a blow.

Fortunately for our Indians, these mysterious conquering white-skins never came up to the north. But some of their animals did. Running wild, little herds of horses found their way up at last to the prairie. They were hard to catch; but if buffalo could be driven into a corral, so could they. It was not very long before the Indians were breaking and riding them; and from that time the tribesmen chased the buffalo on horseback instead of on foot.

Early Buffalo Hunting

Presently news came that more white men or gods had appeared,—this time in the east.

Here is what had happened.

While the early forefathers of our “Indians” were spreading north through Asia and wandering over into America, our own forefathers came wandering and hunting west through Europe. Some of them came to Seeking a Way to the Indies the very edge of the sea before they finally settled down, and learned to plow, and gradually joined together to form nations. Five hundred years ago, three of the strongest nations had grown up on the shores of the Atlantic, in Spain, France, and England. They, like other nations in Europe, used to get spices and incense, pearls and precious stones, ivory and silk, from India and the farther East. But the way to India was now barred by the Mahommedans. The goods that they allowed to pass were heavily taxed on the way, and became very dear.

Most people up to then believed that the earth was flat; but some knew it must be round, and one of these was the Italian named Christopher Columbus. He persuaded the King and Queen of Spain in 1492 to lend him three little ships, and with these he sailed away westward to find a shorter and cheaper trade route to India. He discovered a number of islands, and thinking they were close to India he called them the West Indies and their people Indians,—a mistaken name which has stuck to the native tribes of America ever since. More Spaniards followed; some of them landed on the American mainland, in Mexico; and it was their runaway horses which found their way up to our Western plains.

The English, years before Columbus, had sent ships exploring far out into the Atlantic, in search of a new land; but they did not find it. Five years after Columbus had found the West Indies, however, the King of England sent out ships under another Italian, Cabot, who took a more northerly route. That expedition came in 1497 to Labrador, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia; so the English were the first white men to French Come up the St. Lawrence discover the mainland of America in modern times. We know now that five hundred years earlier the Norsemen, after settling in Iceland and Greenland, visited Nova Scotia or New England; but they probably sailed away again very soon. Some of them may have been captured and “adopted” into Indian tribes. At any rate they vanished, and their adventure was forgotten. European fishermen, too, had been gathering harvests of cod from the Newfoundland banks long before Columbus was born, and they probably landed; but they wrote no accounts of what they had seen, and their stories attracted little notice.

The French explorers came soon after the English; one of them, Jacques Cartier, of St. Malo, in Brittany, sailed up the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1534, and got as far as Montreal on his next voyage in 1535. Another great Frenchman, Champlain, founded at Quebec, in 1608, the first Canadian settlement which has had an unbroken history to our own time. For a long while, however, the towns of “New France” on the St. Lawrence were little more than fur-trading posts, as fur was the only Canadian product that any one in Europe thought of much value.

The real object of the first French explorers was the same as that of Columbus, to find a short cut to Asia. Even the fur trade, rich as it might be, was nothing compared to the trade they hoped to carry on with India and China. Jacques Cartier, when he first sailed into the mouth of the St. Lawrence, hoped he had discovered the “North-west Passage” through America, never dreaming that the western ocean was three thousand miles away across a whole wide continent. The Mississippi Explored

To explore the West, then, was the ambition of more than one brave Frenchman who left the new settlements behind and paddled up the St. Lawrence,—not to find homes for their people in this new world, but to find a waterway through to the Pacific. In 1666 one of these explorers, La Salle, set out from Montreal for the Great Lakes. Missionaries and fur traders had already reached Lake Huron, and Indians had told them of a great river, the Mississippi, which La Salle thought might flow into the Pacific. He reached first the Ohio and then the Illinois, but did not follow them to their junction with the great river; for he learned, to his great disappointment, that the fur traders had already discovered it to flow south instead of west.

La Salle gave up the idea of reaching China, and, on another adventurous journey, went down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. He proclaimed the sovereignty of France over all the country through which the great river and its tributaries might flow. Long afterwards, accordingly, when traders from the growing English colonies along the Atlantic made their way farther and farther inland, they found the way barred by French forts. Mother England sent troops to their aid, and the united British force, in which George Washington himself was a colonel, broke down French opposition and enabled the colonists to spread westward into the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi. The war was carried on until even Canada in the north was brought under the British flag, by Wolfe’s crowning victory at Quebec. It was, in fact, Britain’s action in freeing her colonists from French opposition that enabled the colonists to turn on Britain herself a few Hudson Discovers the Bay years later, and, this time with the help of French soldiers, to separate themselves from the rest of the English-speaking brotherhood.

Let us turn back now to the earlier days.

The English, like the Spanish and French, were bent on finding a western route to Asia. Nearly eighty years after Cabot’s voyage to Labrador, another little English ship, of only twenty tons, sailed from London on this adventure. Martin Frobisher was her captain’s name. Passing Newfoundland and Labrador, he entered a channel, where he verily believed the land on his right was the coast of Asia. As a matter of fact the channel led nowhere, being only the mouth of a bay—Frobisher Bay, in Baffin Land, as we call it now.

A lump of mineral picked up on shore excited a belief that the barren country was a land of gold. Accordingly, the London merchants sent out a second expedition, and even a third. No gold was found; but Frobisher discovered a new inlet, which became a highway of commerce under the name of Hudson Strait.

The great explorer Hudson, however, did not appear on the scene till 1610, and his first appearance was his last. Passing through the strait, he rounded the north point of Labrador, and, turning southward, sailed out upon a body of water so vast that three months’ exploration left the work unfinished; but it was pretty clear that no way through to the Pacific existed in that direction.

Caught by winter at the south end of the Bay, Hudson and his crew landed and put up wooden shelters, where they spent an unhappy eight months. They failed to lay in a stock of game, and when the breaking ice set A New Way In the ship free, in the middle of June, food was running terribly short. The homeward voyage had barely started when mutineers laid hold of their captain, his young son and half a dozen others, and set them adrift in a boat. The few who survived, when the ship reached England at last, professed to believe that Hudson meant to leave them behind in the Bay if they had not played the trick first, as there was not food enough to keep all alive. Nothing was heard again of the great explorer, though ships were sent in search; but the sea that he won for a grave still bears the modest name of Hudson Bay.

Towing through the Ice—1600

Many a brave man after that met his death in the icy chaos, trying to find the North-west Passage to Asia. There were some, however, who had another aim—they saw in Hudson Strait and Bay a new way to the heart of North America, a way by which the wealth of the great French and Indians at War North-west might be drained off to England, in spite of the French who barred the St. Lawrence route.

Curiously enough, it was a couple of Frenchmen, named Radisson and Groseillers, who led the English in through this unguarded door.

The first French settlers on the St. Lawrence made friends of the Indians living there, the Hurons and Algonquins, and helped them to fight their enemies, the Iroquois. For many years, therefore, the Iroquois were constantly attacking the French, who could not even cultivate their little fields around the river-side towns without muskets slung over their shoulders. Even so, many of them were killed, and most of those taken alive were cruelly tortured.

At the village of Three Rivers, between Quebec and Montreal, lived Pierre Radisson. One spring morning in 1652, when he was about seventeen, he went out hunting, and was captured by a party of redskins in ambush. His life was spared, for an Indian and his wife took a fancy to him, adopted him as their son, and took him with them on their wanderings. He escaped, along with an Algonquin fellow-prisoner; but only by killing three Iroquois. He was captured again, and tortured; his feet were so badly burnt that he was lame for a month; but his Indian “father and mother” ransomed him with gifts to the head men of the tribe, and as he was a brave young fellow and a “good mixer” he became quite popular with his redskinned companions.

In the fall of the following year, these Indians went off raiding into the south, where the Dutch had settled in the present State of New York. At Fort Orange, or Radisson and Groseillers Start Albany, Radisson escaped again. From the Dutch town of New Amsterdam, now New York, he took ship for Europe; but after a few months in his native land of France he got back to his family in Canada, where he had long been given up for dead. He had another narrow escape from Indians when they attacked the fort of Onondaga; but nothing could satisfy his appetite for adventure. Two of his fellow-countrymen had travelled up the lakes as far as Green Bay in Wisconsin, where Indians had told them of other tribes who hunted great beasts on a treeless plain still farther west, and wandered in summer to a northern sea—no doubt our Hudson Bay. A big lake named Winnipeg also, they said, lay up there in the north.

Eager to explore, young Radisson and his sister’s husband, Médard Chouart des Groseillers, set off with a party of Algonquins in 1658, paddled up the Ottawa, through Lake Nipissing, across Lake Huron, and down Lake Michigan to Green Bay, where they spent the winter. Early in the following year they crossed Wisconsin, and came to a great brown river, worthy to rank with the green St. Lawrence. They had discovered the Mississippi. They crossed the river; and for the first time the red man of the West looked on a white man’s face.

The meeting was quite friendly. The Sioux were a warlike tribe, always breathing slaughter against their northern neighbors, the Crees; but as yet they had no quarrel with the whites. It mattered nothing to them if bearded white men were fighting Indians down in the south, as they had heard. The white men were evidently ready to trade as well as fight, for these Sioux were White Men See the Prairie already wearing European beads which must have been brought oversea by the Spaniards and passed up north from tribe to tribe.

The two young Frenchmen travelled for months over the plains. They saw the buffalo and hunted them; the swift and graceful antelope as well. How far west they got we do not know. They heard from the Indians of a range of mountains beyond the sunset; but then, circling south and east again, they set out for home. There they arrived, after two years’ absence, and had a tremendous welcome, not only from their families, but from the Governor of the Colony at Quebec. That was because they had brought home with them a wealth of furs; and skins were very scarce, for the Iroquois so infested the country around that friendly tribes dared not venture down to the settlement with their catch. The Iroquois themselves had no trouble in selling all they caught to the English, who had been settling in New England for thirty years and more.

In New France, the fur trade was a strict monopoly. The Government had given the privilege of dealing in furs to a company, and any one else daring to buy skins without a license was severely punished. When Radisson and Groseillers asked leave to start on another journey to the north and west, the officer in command at Three Rivers refused to let them go, because they would not promise him half their catch. They started in spite of him. This time they kept farther to the north, and reached the country beyond Lake Superior, where they built the pioneer fort of the West. They spent the winter travelling among the Crees, the Sioux in the south, and the Assiniboines up in Manitoba. All the tribes were eager to exchange their furs for guns, knives, Hudson’s Bay Company Formed beads, and other European wares; and when the travellers got back east they brought an enormous quantity of precious fur along with them.

The Governor of the Colony seized nearly the whole of it!

Disgusted with this treatment, Groseillers went over to France and tried to get help in fitting out an expedition to the forbidden West through Hudson Bay; but all his persuasions failed. He and his brother-in-law then went to England, where they were warmly welcomed. By this time several English ships had explored Hudson Bay, and many people were ready to put their money into a venture which promised to capture the fur trade of the West without interference from the French of “Canada.” King Charles himself was much interested in the two young Frenchmen’s scheme, and so was his cousin, Prince Rupert. A royal charter was given in 1670 to the Prince and a few other noblemen and commoners, who thus formed the “Company of Adventurers Trading into Hudson’s Bay.” Radisson and Groseillers were sent out in English ships, and helped to establish forts at the southern end of the Bay.

Thus the Hudson’s Bay Company started on its great trading enterprise, which continues to this day.

Unfortunately, when rival French traders came overland from Quebec and drew away much of the Indian trade, the English Company’s chief officer suspected his two French comrades of playing into the hands of their fellow-countrymen. Radisson went back to England to defend himself. The Company’s chiefs were convinced that the charge against him was false; but as they would only pay him $500 a year for his services Great Explorer’s End he was tempted back to France, where he became a naval officer. Groseillers also was forgiven by the French, and returned to his people at Three Rivers.

Presently both the brothers-in-law went off again to Hudson Bay, this time in French vessels, but in competition with a powerful and jealous French company; and on the return of the expedition to Quebec their furs were confiscated. They appealed to the French Government against this, but could not get justice. Radisson went back to England, made several more voyages to the Bay, and the last we know of him is that in his old age he had a pension of $250 a year from the Hudson’s Bay Company.

He “died poor,” as we say, after making other men’s fortunes. Poor in money, yes; but the men who took the money he made are forgotten, and he will always be remembered as one of our greatest explorers. He had two ambitions, to discover new lands, and to make money by trade. He failed in one, but succeeded brilliantly in the other. A man with two such different aims can hardly ever succeed in both; and Radisson won the aim he most desired. His life was hard, but not poor—far richer than a soft life could have been.