Volume I Part 18 (1/2)
Among the enemy were some Sakis, or Sacs, fighting for the Outagamies, while others of their tribe were among the allies of the French. Seeing the desperate turn of affairs, they escaped from time to time and came over to the winning side, bringing reports of the state of the beleaguered camp. They declared that sixty or eighty women and children were already dead from hunger and thirst, besides those killed by bullets and arrows; that the fire of the besiegers was so hot that the bodies could not be buried, and that the camp of the Outagamies and Mascoutins was a den of infection.
The end was near. The besieged savages called from their palisades to ask if they might send another deputation, and were told that they were free to do so. The chief, Pemoussa, soon appeared at the gate of the fort, naked, painted from head to foot with green earth, wearing belts of wampum about his waist, and others hanging from his shoulders, besides a kind of crown of wampum beads on his head. With him came seven women, meant as a peace-offering, all painted and adorned with wampum.
Three other princ.i.p.al chiefs followed, each with a gourd rattle in his hand, to the cadence of which the whole party sang and shouted at the full stretch of their lungs an invocation to the spirits for help and pity. They were conducted to the parade, where the French and the allied chiefs were already a.s.sembled, and Pemoussa thus addressed them:--
”My father, and all the nations here present, I come to ask for life. It is no longer ours, but yours. I bring you these seven women, who are my flesh, and whom I put at your feet, to be your slaves. But do not think that I am afraid to die; it is the life of our women and children that I ask of you.” He then offered six wampum belts, in token that his followers owned themselves beaten, and begged for mercy. ”Tell us, I pray you,”--these were his last words,--”something that will lighten the hearts of my people when I go back to them.”
Dubuisson left the answer to his allies. The appeal of the suppliant fell on hearts of stone. The whole concourse sat in fierce and sullen silence, and the envoys read their doom in the gloomy brows that surrounded them. Eight or ten of the allied savages presently came to Dubuisson, and one of them said in a low voice: ”My father, we come to ask your leave to knock these four great chiefs in the head. It is they who prevent our enemies from surrendering without conditions. When they are dead, the rest will be at our mercy.”
Dubuisson told them that they must be drunk to propose such a thing.
”Remember,” he said, ”that both you and I have given our word for their safety. If I consented to what you ask, your father at Montreal would never forgive me. Besides, you can see plainly that they and their people cannot escape you.”
The would-be murderers consented to bide their time, and the wretched envoys went back with their tidings of despair.
”I confess,” wrote Dubuisson to the governor, a few days later, ”that I was touched with compa.s.sion; but as war and pity do not agree well together, and especially as I understood that they were hired by the English to destroy us, I abandoned them to their fate.”
The firing began once more, and the allied hordes howled round the camp of their victims like troops of ravenous wolves. But a surprise awaited them. Indians rarely set guards at night, and they felt sure now of their prey. It was the nineteenth day of the siege.[284] The night closed dark and rainy, and when morning came, the enemy were gone. All among them that had strength to move had glided away through the gloom with the silence of shadows, pa.s.sed the camps of their sleeping enemies, and reached a point of land projecting into the river opposite the end of Isle au Cochon, and a few miles above the French fort. Here, knowing that they would be pursued, they barricaded themselves with trunks and branches of trees. When the astonished allies discovered their escape, they hastily followed their trail, accompanied by some of the French, led by Vincennes. In their eagerness they ran upon the barricade before seeing it, and were met by a fire that killed and wounded twenty of them. There was no alternative but to forego their revenge and abandon the field, or begin another siege. Encouraged by Dubuisson, they built their wigwams on the new scene of operations; and, being supplied by the French with axes, mattocks, and two swivels, they made a wall of logs opposite the barricade, from which they galled the defenders with a close and deadly fire. The Mississagas and Ojibwas, who had lately arrived, fished and hunted for the allies, while the French furnished them with powder, ball, tobacco, Indian corn, and kettles. The enemy fought desperately for four days, and then, in utter exhaustion, surrendered at discretion.[285]
The women and children were divided among the victorious hordes, and adopted or enslaved. To the men no quarter was given. ”Our Indians amused themselves,” writes Dubuisson, ”with shooting four or five of them every day.” Here, however, another surprise awaited the conquerors and abridged their recreation, for about a hundred of these intrepid warriors contrived to make their escape, and among them was the great war-chief Pemoussa.
The Outagamies were crippled, but not disabled, for but a part of the tribe was involved in this b.l.o.o.d.y affair. The rest were wrought to fury by the fate of their kinsmen, and for many years they remained thorns in the sides of the French.
There is a disposition to a.s.sume that events like that just recounted were a consequence of the contact of white men with red; but the primitive Indian was quite able to enact such tragedies without the help of Europeans. Before French or English influence had been felt in the interior of the continent, a great part of North America was the frequent witness of scenes still more lurid in coloring, and on a larger scale of horror. In the first half of the seventeenth century the whole country, from Lake Superior to the Tennessee, and from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, was ravaged by wars of extermination, in which tribes, large and powerful by Indian standards, perished, dwindled into feeble remnants, or were absorbed by other tribes and vanished from sight. French pioneers were sometimes involved in the carnage, but neither they nor other Europeans were answerable for it.[286]
FOOTNOTES:
[279] See Chapter I.
[280] _Memoir on the Indians between Lake Erie and the Mississippi_, in _N. Y. Col. Docs._, ix. 885.
[281] _Memoir on the Indians between Lake Erie and the Mississippi._
[282] This paper is printed, not very accurately, in the _Collection de Doc.u.ments relatifs a la Nouvelle France_, i. 623 (Quebec, 1883).
[283] ”Cri horrible, dont la terre trembla.”--_Dubuisson a Vaudreuil, 15 Juin, 1712._ This is the official report of the affair.
[284] According to the paper ascribed to Lery it was only the eighth.
[285] The paper ascribed to Lery says that they surrendered on a promise from Vincennes that their lives should be spared, but that the promise availed nothing.
[286] _Dubuisson a Vaudreuil, 15 Juin, 1712._ This is Dubuisson's report to the governor, which soon after the event he sent to Montreal by the hands of Vincennes. He says that the great fatigue through which he has just pa.s.sed prevents him from giving every detail, and he refers Vaudreuil to the bearer for further information. The report is, however, long and circ.u.mstantial.
_etat de ce que M. Dubuisson a depense pour le service du Roy pour s'attirer les Nations et les mettre dans ses interets afin de resister aux Outagamis et aux Mascoutins qui etaient payes des Anglais pour detruire le poste du Fort de Ponchartrain du Detroit, 14 Octobre, 1712._ Dubuisson reckons his outlay at 2,901 livres.
These doc.u.ments, with the narrative ascribed to the engineer Lery, are the contemporary authorities on which the foregoing account is based.
CHAPTER XIII.
1697-1750.