THE OHIO VALLEY-GREAT LAKES ETHNOHISTORY
ARCHIVES: THE MIAMI COLLECTION
It is noted that the following work from the Miami Archives should be read and
considered within the historical context in which it was composed and printed.
The opinions expressed and the language used do not reflect the opinions or
standards of the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, but are, rather,
indicative of thought in that historical moment during which the document was
published.
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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(page 133) ment, forward from Quebec to the French ministry in Versailles across the ocean. Between the lines he told Quebec, and not Versailles, that the news had come to him from a spot on the Illinois River inconvenient to locate by words, west of Mazon and not west of the Rock.
The commandant of Detroit once had commanded at Fort St. Joseph.23 The Illinois of the Rock had been his neighbors. He knew the prairie country.
The officer could not fail to see that Canadian strategy against the Foxes had failed. Yet for the eye of Versailles he made it seem by equivocation that the Foxes had been halted and held fast, by Canadian Indians, between the Illinois and Wabash Rivers, within the territory of Canada. His report set a precedent of deceit that his fellow officer and even the Governor accepted and followed.
Armed with bows and arrows, armed too with a few French muskets, that Governor's enemies had come down through the knee-high prairie grass of spring. Trails around the foot of Lake Michigan the Foxes found barred to them by Potawatomi, Kickapoo, and Mascoutens. Canadian allies sent news of an enemy's arrival to the Peoria of the Mississippi and to Fort St. Joseph, whence it may be believed the news went on post haste to Detroit and to the Governor in Quebec. Provisions of that Governor's strategy brought the Foxes early in July to the Illinois River not far from the Rock.
With warriors three hundred and fifty in number, with old men, women and children to raise the number nearly to a thousand, again the Foxes invaded the Peoria country. Instead of pushing their march across Grand Prairie they pitched camp. Fox messengers took the long trail to the "British" Seneca Iroquois asking reinforcement in order (page 134) that a homeless tribe might go on to join the Iroquois confederacy.24
Kickapoo, Mascoutens, and Potawatomi sat waiting in Mazon. At the Rock the Peoria carried out the Canadian plan made against the Foxes.
Deserters as they were, this tribe of the Illinois did not appeal to Fort Chartres. About the middle of July their messengers came again to the Peoria of the Mississippi telling that Foxes had seized women and children of their village and murdered the son of their great-chief. With more difficulty than he cared to confess a commandant at Fort Chartres held his savages and his French traders and farmers from an expedition on their own account.
If an unofficial expedition had started from the Mississippi at that time it would have acted its part intended by Canadian strategy. Toward the end of the month the Fox nation took up impatiently their march from the Rock toward the River Mazon's headquarters and the ungarrisoned Canadian post of the Wea beyond on the Wabash.
Now timid Peoria sharpshooters escorted their enemy across the Louisianan meadows of the Rock and across those farther meadows of Grand Prairie that might be equally of Louisiana and of Canada. Peoria messengers sped to Mazon. Two hundred and fifty warriors set out form Mazon to answer the call. One hundred of the new allies turned back. One hundred and fifty went on, traveling slowly in order not to meet the enemy too near the Rock. Morning on Grand Prairie showed them battle between skirmishing Peoria and the Foxes encumbered by the presence of women and children. Canadian strategy seemed to be succeeding.
Men of Mazon ran up through summer grass waist-high (page 135) to join the attack against the Foxes. The Illinois warriors chose this moment for taking to their heels. Abandoned by half his total force, the war-chief of the Potawatomi could do no more than continue the skirmish. The Foxes dared not venture on east-southeastward toward the Wea post. The allies lacked strength to hold them where they were. Back into the Illinois country of the Rock, back into Louisiana, the Foxes retreated. Canadian strategy had failed.
As the Foxes retreated they were heard to cry out (or so it was written for the eye of Versailles) that a party of mounted scouts had been reported not far away. The war-chief of the Potawatomi could name no one who this might be save Monsieur de Vincennes with his men and his Spanish horses from the Piankeshaw post of Fort Chartres. Neither the Potawatomi nor the Governor in Quebec could fail to understand why an officer on scout duty for Louisiana should not aid in halting the northwestward retreat.
Back went the Foxes more than a half-day's march, following it may be the northwestward course of the Vermilion River. Night brought them to the point, four and three-quarter English miles directly south and across forest and meadow from the Rock, where woodland descends between ravines to the northern bank of the Vermilion in its westward course. There they stopped.
Along a five-hundred foot front on the high, steep bank of shale and up the rocky slope to the crest, sixty feet above, they made themselves strong. At the east, one ravine gave them an escarp with a counterscarp beyond musket shot. A double palisade, stake leaning against stake, soon topped the gullied escarp of the river bank. At the southwest an artificial mound and a gully still tell how firmly the Foxes held that angle of their fort. Fascined embankments with protecting ditches are said to have climbed the slope northward (page 136) from river bank to crest and to have crossed from ravine to ravine on the summit level where now the land is tilled.25
The Illinois of the Rock sent messengers for the third time to their kinsmen near Fort Chartres. Across sixty leagues of prairie the Foxes sent messengers to the Wea asking for aid or for neutrality. The Potawatomi war-chief went on a mission of his own to that same tribe of the Wabash. To Fort St. Joseph two Mascouten warriors hastened along the shortest trail, which led sixty leagues straight26 eastward through Mazon. So on August 16 Lieutenant de Villiers of the St. Joseph learned news that, after two days of hesitation, he forwarded to his Fort Miami and to Detroit.27
Two days he hesitated. Canadian strategy had failed. The Foxes had turned back to Louisiana. Should he go to the Rock? Should he dare go beyond his own frontier?
The King had promised favor to the Canadian officer who should destroy the Foxes.28 Yet, if Lieutenant de Villiers would destroy the Foxes before the Seneca might come, he must destroy them, now, at the Rock. In that case could he claim a Canadian victory? Could he claim it and yet not reveal to Versailles that Quebec had annexed men and territory and even fur trade without royal permission? Failure, as in the recent expedition of the Straits, would in any (page 137) case discredit him. Failure might cause his ruin. So too, at the Rock, might success.
Lieutenant de Villiers was forty-eight years old. He was the father of a large family. No longer did he hold the political influence that had made him an ensign at the age of eighteen. During the sixteen years of his lieutenancy he had waited for the second promotion that chance now might grant to him at last or deny forever.29 His fur trade also was involved. Two days he hesitated. Then interest won its struggle against prudence, and he made his decision. Two days still later, on August 10, he set out on his journey "to the rock."
With him and his garrison, traders, and warriors, went his two eldest sons, his twenty-two-year-old namesake the first-ensign of Fort St. Joseph,30 and Louis, a cadet, on that day just twenty years of age.31 Whether a seventeen-year-old son, Franois, made one of the party is not recorded. From his first camp the lieutenant wrote to Quebec a letter that, forwarded from Detroit, may have given the Governor full knowledge of events. Then he traveled onward over such a route as that by which news of battle had been brought to him.
Mascouten runners bearing that news to Fort St. Joseph had left the Vermilion River about August 3.32 At the same time Peoria messengers had started south on a journey that brought news perhaps even within four days and nights to Fort Chartres (Prairie du Rocher, Ill.).
Here in the bottomland of the Mississippi River stood the capital of Louisiana's Illinois country. Here through (page 138) the death of Deliette and another superior officer the governorship of Illinois and command of the fort had devolved by seniority on the elderly, illiterate, half-pay lieutenant Robert Grosson, by courtesy called sieur de St. Ange, who had passed much of his life in Canada- it is said, as an enlisted man.
So great were expenses in the southern colony, so small the yield of the fur trade, that the King in 1724 had reduced by half the European army of Louisiana. Only half-pay commissions in companies earlier disbanded could be offered in New Orleans to St. Ange and his elder son when they transferred themselves to Louisianan service in 1722. More recently the Governor in New Orleans had kept up a garrison of sixty soldiers for Illinois despite an order from France limiting the force to two officers and six men.33
Lieutenant St. Ange for his own sake must further his Governor's policy34 of increasing again the European army. Otherwise Fort Chartres would be left dependent for military support on the unwarlike Illinois. And half the Peoria of the river, and half those Peorias' fur trade, had just been stolen by Lieutenant de Villiers.
Peoria in exile among the Cahokia tribe near Fort Chartres were eager to see their old hunting grounds freed from the threat of the Foxes.35 In the first days of August news came to the Mississippi drawing the commander of Illinois into sympathy with his savages. Peoria messengers, and another dispatches perhaps by Lieutenant de Vincennes, reported the Foxes surrounded at the Rock. Canadian strategy had failed. Canadians could have no choice but to reinforce their own savage allies, as well as an expedition from down river, within the territory of Louisiana.36
Illinois warriors set out to gather four hundred strong near the winter's town below Peoria Lake. With one hundred Frenchmen, farmers, traders, and soldiers, including at least one of his sons,37 Lieutenant St. Ange followed them. Paddling, it seems, in dug-outs up the rivers in order that a tale of swift travel by white men might uphold the military theory (? illeg. copy) of Louisiana, Lieutenant St. Ange reached the rendezvous of his savages. The advance continued by land. On the morning of August 17 the allies of Louisiana joined the Potawatomi, Kickapoo, and Mascoutens of Canada and the Illinois of the Rock in besieging the Foxes' fort.
Above the left or southerly bank of the Vermilion, within the territory of Louisiana, Lieutenant St. Ange made his camp on the hillside between the recurving river and a deep ravine at the west. Beyond narrow water he could see the tepees of the Foxes on fortified slopes that climbed from river and eastern ravine among oaks of the valley. He did not say in his later report that an outwork at the west made sharp a spur of high land above the fort's western embankment. That fort, enclosing three acres of hillside, he described as viewed from afar, " a little clump of woods enclosed with stakes and situated on a gentle slope, which rose toward the west and northwest along a little river."38
Estimating distance not from the Rock but from the woodland that was the Peorias' line of defence beyond a flat meadow, Lieutenant St. Ange located the Foxes' fort at one league "below" the home of Peoria deserters. The expression that he used, au dessous, held various meaning in Canadian French equivalent to en aval, down river. On the St. Lawrence and the "lower" great lakes it would mean east or northeast. On Lake Superior, the "upper" lake, and Lake Michigan, it would mean either toward Quebec or
(page 140) Map: Forest and Prairie Lands in Illinois, 1730. The shaded areas indicate timber. (illeg. copy)
(page 141) toward New Orleans. St. Ange, reporting to New Orleans, gave to it the meaning of south.
One league below the forest of the Rock the river valley, the eastern ravine, and the outwork at the west held French sharpshooters beyond effective musket shot of the fort. The Foxes' palisade was too strong for storming, even if Illinois warriors would attack. Yet Lieutenant St. Ange saw one weakness that this fort shared with the Rock itself. No springs flow from that promontory between ravines. The sun of August was shining hot. The Foxes could draw drinking water only from the river, where water and broken rock were quarreling under a little precipice of shale.
The Louisianan commander began to raise a line of breastworks. On the high hillside at the south, receding eighty feet above the stream, he built two field redoubts from which a fusilade if not a sighted shot might block the gullies of the river bank even at night.39
So well did the counterworks progress that on the third day the Foxes asked for terms. Terms were refused. Battle by sharpshooters renewed itself. Within the next few days the French party increased its strength with the coming of Canadian auxiliaries under command of Lieutenant de Villiers.
With Lieutenant de Villiers had come from Fort St. Joseph his sons, his little garrison, his Canadian interpreter Pierre Raume, and his traders, about fifty Frenchmen in all, and three times as many warriors, Potawatomi, Miami, and Sauk. A direct route would have led him after a march of sixty leagues to the neighborhood of the Rock. Such a route, or the longer, easier voyage on the rivers, carried him by way of the Mascouten-Kickapoo camp in Mazon.40
There the leader added to his party the hundred warriors who two weeks earlier had refused to advance against their old friends. The day of his arrival on the Vermilion with three hundred men in all saw also the arrival of two hundred Wea and Piankeshaw brought across sixty leagues of prairie by the Potawatomi war-chief. Both these Miami tribes, no longer tributary to Lieutenant de Villiers' commerce, joined Lieutenant St. Ange and the Illinois warriors. The Peoria Illinois of the Rock acknowledged the compact of 1729 by camping with the Canadians. The besiegers numbered twelve hundred men.41
Even if Lieutenant de Vincennes did not perhaps make part of the Louisianan company, the meeting of the two commanders cannot have been cordial. These were commercial rivals. Neither could forget the allurement of the Wea. Neither could forget the allurement of the Peoria. Neither could ignore that a Canadian political scheme intended not wholly to advantage of Louisiana was acting on that field to disadvantage of Canada.
Lieutenant de Villiers, director of trade at Fort St. Joseph, elegant father of six elegant sons, Canadian ensign at the early age of eighteen, now a lieutenant of full military rank and commander of an entire district,42 confronted a political enemy.
He saw an illiterate father of all but illiterate sons. He saw a man who, nine years before, had set out from Fort St. Joseph without official distinction to be commissioned a little later, at the age of nearly fifty, in a company that did not exist. He saw a rude Frenchman of the wilderness, possessor of no trade concession, half-pay lieutenant of Louisiana, district and post commander only through ultimate devolution.43
For the moment the leaders put politics aside. They refused an offer of the Foxes to surrender on condition that all lives should be spared. This refusal won applause among Illinois warriors and threatening censure among those of Canada. Lieutenant de Villiers had come to the Rock with allies most of whom had been allies of the nation that now they were besieging. His imprudence became manifest.
Not only the Sauk but also other tribes of Canada demanded that prospective captives should be enslaved rather than massacred. The Illinois could prophesy with reason that the northern tribes would set free any prisoners taken. Thus willfully would be created again the enemy whose destruction had been made possible. Again a Canadian expedition against the Foxes would work out only in expense to the government. Again the men of Fort Chartres would come back, as in 1728, from an enterprise made vain by "the scant coperation, the attitude, and the poor leadership" of Canadian officers.
The career of Lieutenant de Villiers depended on firm treatment of this situation. Lieutenant St. Ange told later that the Canadian seemed nevertheless intimidated by his Sauk. Yet, as the officer's report continues, with reference to the Wea as sly as it is ironical, the Canadian party was not the stronger one. The rough-and-ready Louisianan held the situation in control. The siege went forward as it had begun.
Lieutenant de Villiers and his sons chose a
campground on the prairie level, northeast of the Foxes' fort. It would have
been a nice question, one for lawyers and surveyors to argue, whether that fort
stood partly within Canada or quite within the Illinois country as defined in
1684 by the King. The intercolonial boundary, if it had been drawn to the
letter of the royal grant, might have passed southward from the Rock to the
Vermilion and southeastward along the river
______________________________
23 Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVI, 398.
24 Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 102, 110, 118-19.
25 Cf. maps of Chaussegros de Lery in Archives Nationales, Paris, C11 A 126 (Karpinski Collection, photostats, in Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago; tracings in Illinois State Historical Society, Transactions for 1908, p. 254), Plan du Fort des Sauvages Renards and Blocus du Fort, Nov. 15, 1730. The site includes the "rathole" coal mine of B. F. Studebaker. Site and mine may be reached through the Charles Ott farm on the Ottawa road nearly one mile east northeast of the Lowell bridge, Illinois route 178, by lane shown on U. S. Geological Survey map of Illinois, La Salle quadrangle. For the site of the fort and the Canadian camp, see Ottawa quadrangle; of the Louisianan camp, Streator quadrangle. The site may be viewed from a public road mounting southward from the farther river bank one mile east of the hamlet of Lowell.
26 Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 100: ". . . in haste. . . only two days."
27 Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 100-02, 114.
28 Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVI, 440, XVII, 21.
29 Bulletin des Recherches Historiques, XII, 163-64, 174-75; Canadian Archives Reports for 1899, supplement, 120.
30 Bulletin des Recherches Historiques, XII, 174; Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 71, 117
31 Bulletin des Recherches Historiques, XII, 171-72.
32 Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 100; estimates of cross-country racers in Chicago Tribune, Aug. 6, 1932, p. 15, c. 6.
33 Charles Gayarre, Louisiana, Its Colonial History and Romance (New York, 1851), 370, 400; Alvord, 159-60.
34 Stewart, 368-69.
35 Alvord, 172.
36 Cf. Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 101, 110.
37 Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 130. The two sons in the Illinois country were Pierre, thirty-six years old, and Louis St. Ange de Bellerive, twenty-eight years old.
38 Steward, 373.
39 Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 111, 115; Blocus du Fort.
40 A summer's trail passed from Niles, Mich., to Rolling Prairie, Ind., to Joliet, Ill., and westward along the left bank of the Desplaines-Illinois. The league quoted is the post league of 2,000 toises, or 2.422 English statute miles.
41Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 114-15; Blocus du Fort.
42 Bulletin des Recherches Historiques, XII, 161 ff.
43 P-F-X. Charlevoix, Journal of New France, letter of Oct. 5, 1721, and letter of Oct. 20, author's note; Illinois State Historical Society, Transactions for 1909, pp. 135-46; Alvord, 158, 210.
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