Part 1 (1/2)
A Little Girl in Old Detroit.
by Amanda Minnie Douglas.
CHAPTER I.
A HALF STORY.
When La Motte Cadillac first sailed up the Strait of Detroit he kept his impressions for after travelers and historians, by transcribing them in his journal. It was not only the romantic side, but the usefulness of the position that appealed to him, commanding the trade from Canada to the Lakes, ”and a door by which we can go in and out to trade with all our allies.” The magnificent scenery charmed the intrepid explorer. The living crystal waters of the lakes, the sh.o.r.es green with almost tropical profusion, the natural orchards bending their branches with fruit, albeit in a wild state, the bloom, the riotous, clinging vines trailing about, the great forests dense and dark with kingly trees where birds broke the silence with songs and chatter, and game of all kinds found a home; the rivers, sparkling with fish and thronged with swans and wild fowl, and blooms of a thousand kinds, made marvelous pictures.
The Indian had roamed undisturbed, and built his temporary wigwam in some opening, and on moving away left the place again to solitude.
Beside its beauty was the prospect of its becoming a mart of commerce.
But these old discoverers had much enthusiasm, if great ignorance of individual liberty for anyone except the chief rulers. There was a vigorous system of repression by both the King of France and the Church which hampered real advance. The brave men who fought Indians, who struggled against adverse fortunes, who explored the Mississippi valley and planted the nucleus of towns, died one after another. More than half a century later the English, holding the substantial theory of colonization, that a wider liberty was the true soil in which advancement progressed, after the conquest of Canada, opened the lake country to newcomers and abolished the restrictions the Jesuits and the king had laid upon religion.
The old fort at Detroit, all the lake country being ceded, the French relinquis.h.i.+ng the magnificent territory that had cost them so much in precious lives already, took on new life. True, the French protested, and many of them went to the West and made new settlements. The most primitive methods were still in vogue. Canoes and row boats were the methods of transportation for the fur trade; there had been no printing press in all New France; the people had followed the Indian expedients in most matters of household supplies. For years there were abortive plots and struggles to recover the country, affiliation with the Indians by both parties, the Pontiac war and numerous smaller skirmishes.
And toward the end of the century began the greatest struggle for liberty America had yet seen. After the war of the Revolution was ended all the country south of the Lakes was ceded to the United Colonies.
But for some years England seemed disposed to hold on to Detroit, disbelieving the colonies could ever establish a stable government. As the French had supposed they could reconquer, so the English looked forward to repossession. But Detroit was still largely a French town or settlement, for thus far it had been a military post of importance.
So it might justly be called old this afternoon, as almost two centuries had elapsed since the French had built their huts and made a point for the fur trade, that Jeanne Angelot sat outside the palisade, leaning against the Pani woman who for years had been a slave, from where she did not know herself, except that she had been a child up in the fur country. Madame De Longueil had gone back to France with her family and left the Indian woman to s.h.i.+ft for herself in freedom. And then had come a new charge.
The morals of that day were not over-precise. But though the woman had had a husband and two sons, one boy had died in childhood, the other had been taken away by the husband who repudiated her. She was the more ready to mother this child dropped mysteriously into her lap one day by an Indian woman whose tongue she did not understand.
”Tell it over again,” said Jeanne with an air of authority, a dainty imperiousness.
She was leaning against one knee, the woman's heels being drawn up close to her body, making a back to the seat of soft turf, and with her small hand thumping the woman's brown one against the other knee.
”Mam'selle, you have heard it so many times you could tell it yourself in the dark.”
”But perhaps I could not tell it in the daylight,” said the girl, with mischievous laughter that sent musical ripples on the sunny air.
The woman looked amazed.
”Why should you be better able to do it at night?”
”O, you foolish Pani! Why, I might summon the _itabolays_--”
”Hus.h.!.+ hus.h.!.+ Do not call upon such things.”
”And the _s.h.i.+l loups_, though they cannot talk. And the _windigoes_--”
”Mam'selle!” The Indian woman made as if she would rise in anger and crossed herself.
”O, Pani, tell the story. Why, it was night you always say. And so I ought to have some night-sight or knowledge. And you were feeling lonely and miserable, and--why, how do you know it was not a _windigo_?”
”Child! child! you set one crazy! It was flesh and blood, a squaw with a blanket about her and a great bundle in her arms. And I did not go in the palisade that night. I had come to love Madame and the children, and it was hard to be shoved out homeless, and with no one to care. There is fondness in the Indian blood, Mam'selle.”
The Indian's voice grew forceful and held a certain dignity. The child patted her hand and pressed it up to her cheek with a caressing touch.
”The De Bers wanted to buy me, but Madame said no. And Touchas, the Outawa woman, had bidden me to her wigwam. I heard the bell ring and the gates close, and I sat down under this very oak--”