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:J ournal of the Illinois
State Historical Society, vol. 28,
nos. 2-4, pp. 123-163.
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valley to cross the sixty-league breadth of Grand Prairie. Drawn by the compass, such a line might pass through the Foxes' fort. Drawn by the stars, it would include the fort within Louisiana. Perhaps by mere chance the Canadians pitched their camp two or three hundred yards within a boundary that Canada could claim.
The Canadians at the northeast built encompassing earthworks of their own with two redoubts. They built also two scaffoldings so that bullets from a height might fall in the fort's ditches, out of which Fox warriors were firing French bullets with French powder from French muskets against French soldiers.
As these works went forward distrust of the Sauk was seen to have been well based. The Sauk were giving food and Fort St. Joseph's powder and shot in secret to the Foxes and were helping noncombattants to pass through the French lines to freedom. On September 1 Lieutenant de Villiers turned his own fire upon the point where his own allies were communicating with the enemy.
Illinois warriors, unwarlike but quarrelsome, sought to take revenge on the traitors. Disorder to advantage of the besieged arose among the besiegers. Disorder ceased when the Louisianan commander asserted supreme authority. Lieutenant St. Ange put his hundred Frenchmen under arms between his allies and the warriors whom Lieutenant de Villiers had brought from Canada.
On that same day the officer of Fort St. Joseph commanding at Fort Miami appeared with ten Frenchmen and two hundred Indians in response to the message that Lieutenant de Villiers, his superior, had sent him from the St. Joseph. He brought news of a circular letter addressed by the Governor in Quebec to Canadian post commanders in the western country.44
(page 144A) Map: Outline of the Foxes' Fort and French positions, August, 1730 (in red), from Chaussegros de Lery's Blocus du Fort, superimposed upon the U. S. Geological Survey Map. (illeg. copy)
If Lieutenant de Villiers already had thought his position difficult, what may have been his feelings when his second-in-command gave him news from Quebec? At undeniable cost to the government of Canada, Lieutenant de Villiers had led his garrison, his traders, and his savages to the line of his frontier. It was not his fault that Canadian strategy had failed. Yet almost every act he had committed in trying to remedy failure had been forbidden him by a "circular" pointedly composed for his own reading, which nearly had reached his post at the time of his departure for Louisiana.
The Frenchmen of Forts Chartres, St. Joseph, and Miami, with their Indian allies of Canada, Louisiana, the Wabash, and the Rock, held a council. Only destruction of the Foxes could justify the Canadian expedition now. No longer might the Sauk put forward their demands. No longer might other Canadian warriors waver in indecision. Under orders from Quebec all Canadians agreed with all Louisianans to destroy the Fox nation.
The Sauk had offered good argument for compromise with the Foxes. The water supply of the fort had not yet been cut off, and the food supply had failed without, as much as within, the palisade. Game had vanished from the sun-baked prairie. Fourteen hundred besiegers were gnawing the leather of their equipment.
On September 7 two hundred Illinois deserted; at least, so says the record of Louisiana. Lieutenant de Villiers set the number at three hundred.
One hundred Canadian allies absented themselves on the following day. Their commander said that they had gone hunting.
No time remained for further desertion. One hour before sunset of the eighth the first storm of autumn broke violently. Night followed with chill, with fog, with drizzling rain. Cold darkness dripped upon the Foxes' fort. The Canadian (page 146) Indians, whose duty it was to guard the northerly entrenchments, rebelled against duty and kept to their camp at the northeast.
In the night, in the dark, in the cold, in the drizzle, in the fog, out of the unwatched ditch the Foxes stole away. Not toward the northern meadow did they turn then, not up toward Canada. Down they went southwestward, into the depths of the darkness, into the thick of the fog, to ford the river unseen below the camp of St. Ange. Then southward they climbed to the Grand Prairie of Louisiana.
Somewhere the crying of children told distant ears that the Foxes were escaping. Into the Canadian trench a prisoner from an alien tribe came creeping to reveal the craft of the Foxes.
In the night, in the fog, friend could not be told from enemy if a battle should begin. The Foxes groped on through obscurity. Women and children stumbled ahead, protected at the rear by the warriors. Avengers from Louisiana followed close, ready to halt them in the dawn.
Through black night a guide showed the Foxes a path. Out into Grand Prairie the recurving Vermilion River led fugitives southeastward along such a way as they must go to gain sanctuary in forests beyond the Wabash. Two dozen English miles they traveled, it was said, through wet grass shoulder high. Canadian warriors, starting in pursuit at dawn, overtook them where the Illinois were delaying their advance. The blood of the Foxes reddened the earth of a meadow almost as much of Canada as it was of Louisiana. Canadian strategy, thanks to Lieutenant St. Ange, at last had succeeded.45
Or had Lieutenant de Villiers aided success by failing willfully to drive even his faithful Potawatomi to a night-time journey and an attack at dawn?
It may be that Lieutenant St. Ange had some such suspicion in his mind when, later in the day, he wrote his report. With more thought to politics than to military art he described, as acting Governor of Illinois, the expedition of "M. de St. Ange, commanding officer at Fort Chartres." Illiterate as he was, he told his story either by dictation or in the words of a secretary as Canadian as he; the Norman salt of Canada seasons this French hodge-podge of narration, of ironical complaint, of intercolonial dispute.46
Lieutenant St. Ange said nothing of Peoria warriors stolen from him. Canadian occupation of the Rock gave him no basis for official protest. Innuendo and insinuation he chose instead for discussing the imprudence of his rival, whom he named with casual sarcasm as commandant only of the River St. Joseph and not of the Wea, the Piankeshaw, and the Illinois of the Rock. To accompany his text he caused to be sketched a plan of the Foxes' fort.
The report extended itself in supporting the policy of the Governor in New Orleans. In the hands of that dignitary report and sketch served to illustrate a thesis on European colonial armies that went on, next spring, from New Orleans to France. Recounting the defeat of the Foxes "within the territory of Louisiana" the Governor recommended that the commandery of Illinois should be erected into a provincial general headquarters.47
Such a change in the government of Illinois would bring a younger officer to command at Fort Chartres, but not to disadvantage of St. Ange. St. Ange had grown old. His service of nearly fifty years to colonial France had been crowned by victory over the Foxes despite interference from Canada. In the year 1732 his resignation as commandant was given and accepted.
One year later St. Ange had the satisfaction of surrendering Fort Chartres to his successor. Coming with the new officer he could see two companies of French soldiers and four cannon. Instead of being reduce the military strength of Illinois now rose to one hundred and fifty men, to honor the ex-commandant in his old age.
Nearby his fort St. Ange lived on with his wife and his young daughter Elizabeth. He received in good time the rank of captain. First his elder son and then the youngest served in the southern forests of the Wabash that Fort Chartres had taken away from Fort St. Joseph.
Unlike Lieutenant St. Ange, Lieutenant de Villiers put off the making of his report. Returning to camp after the battle of September 9 he too caused sketches to be made of the Foxes' fort and of the counterworks. Then the officer directed that this monument to a Canadian scheme should be destroyed.48
Cultivation on the prairie has smoothed away any trace of a northern curtain. Erosion has concealed whatever decaying logs may have left of fascined ridges mounting the rocky slope. The angle at the southwest on the river bank still is marked by an ancient mound and a gully from which with the aid of the old Canadian maps and their scales, the den of the Foxes may be recognized.
From the Foxes' fort a homeward journey allowed time to (page 149) Lieutenant de Villiers for thought. His letter of August 10 could be forwarded in copy to France or held in Quebec at the Governor's pleasure. The report about to be made up need not duplicate its contents. On September 23 when the lieutenant in Fort St. Joseph wrote of his expedition he spoke at once of his journey "to the rock." Having done a duty to truth he put down no other word that might aid Versailles in following him on his adventure.
Like the commandant of Detroit one month earlier, Lieutenant de Villiers suggested, equivocally, that the fort as well as the fighting of two battles had been within the territory of Canada. He spoke of the Wea and Piankeshaw as if they were his own allies. Perhaps through oversight he made one similar reference to the Illinois of the Rock.
Acknowledging between the lines receipt of a circular in the field, he confessed the treachery of the Sauk but not that he had given them powder and shot. Unlike Lieutenant St. Ange, he reported as only a few the fifty or sixty Fox warriors who had escaped capture. By implication he denied the existence of those prisoners who not much later were to be freed by his own allies.
Canada's expedition had gone to the border of Louisiana. To Lieutenant St. Ange the commandant of St. Joseph owed escape from failure perhaps more costly than that of the expedition from the Straits. Lieutenant de Villiers took nevertheless for himself all credit for complete and Canadian success.49
First-Ensign Nicolas-Antoine Coulon de Villiers and the interpreter Raume set out to carry the report to Quebec. They arrived too late to include their news among the autumn's documents dispatched to France, but under date of November 2 the Governor and the Intendant signed a joint and jubilant letter to the governmental minister in Ver- (page 150) sailles. They asked that a captaincy should be given to Lieutenant de Villiers.50
Unauthorized annexation of the upper Illinois had been justified. Canadian strategy had worked out to intercolonial benefit. Yet the statesmen of Canada omitted to confess that such strategy had been prepared or such annexation made, if only provisionally.
Ordinarily a Governor of Canada might not have gained help in deceit from an Intendant. The two high offices of colonial government had been created to act in check, one against the other. The Marquis de Beauharnois had little to fear, however, from his current associate.
The person who in 1726 had sailed with Beauharnois to Quebec to direct the fur trade had rebelled against the superior dignity of the Governor. Rebellion had caused his recall.51 His successor, Gilles de Hocquart, had come from France in 1729 with only a temporary commission. Hocquart's career in Canada hung upon the favor of the Governor. Hocquart dared not censure his patron openly before the time when his full commission as Intendant52 reached him in 1731. By that time he was too thoroughly entangled to withdraw form a plot that seemed to favor his fur trade.
The acting Intendant did offer a report of operations based on divergent information that he got from Raume. Significantly the European called attention to remarks transcribed in the dialect of upper Canada.53 It does not appear whether more than Hocquart's covering letter, as sent later in copy, was permitted by Governor de Beauharnois ever to reach France. The consolidated report that came before the ministry54 includes nothing except information forwarded by Beauharnois himself.
Thus far the Governor had been able to report equivocally without doing direct violence to truth. Lieutenant de Villiers' letter of August 10 seems to have been thought unsuitable for transmission either in whole or in the extracts that Hocquart promised. The lieutenant's letter of September 23, despite its unhappy mention of the Rock, went forward in copy, though without a capital-R. Yet copying the sketches made on the bank of the Vermilion was seen to be a task of peculiar delicacy.
If words may be strung on a thread that is twisted of ambiguity, equivocation, and truth, a maker of maps can have no such recourse. The civilian (commissioned as captain) who was official engineer and mapmaker of Canada could not afford to ace except in good faith. Then too that hot tempered Provenal was a man of spectacular honesty.55 Therefore, it may be believed, the Governor and the ensign worked together to deceive Gaspard Chaussegros de Lery.56
Strange phrasing and punctuation of the map's titles intimate that it might be the Foxes' fort, and not the Wea post, that had stood "fifty leagues" east southeast of the Rock. Truthfully one title says that the fort had stood "between the rivers of the Illinois." Then a reference to the larger river under its almost forgotten Indian name57 makes identification more difficult. Through an error not shared58 by the ensign's father in his report the unnamed "little river" is shown as flowing east instead of west. Otherwise the map of the siege, dated in Quebec, November 15, 1730, needs (page 152) only comparison with the modern contour map for proof of accuracy.59
Inexperience of Ensign de Villiers in deception may be seen in the data offered for the map Siege of the Fort. Reports from the field show the besieging forces to have been equally divided. Supporting his father's pretension to leadership the ensign nevertheless divided the total of fourteen hundred soldiers, traders, farmers, and warriors into one detachment of eight hundred for Canada and another of six hundred for Louisiana. To the sieur de St. Ange, whom he named impolitely as Mr. St. Ange, he conceded the Piankeshaw. He failed to mention the Wea, whom Canada still claimed but who had made part of the detachment from the south. He failed to mention the Sauk. Perhaps through an oversight like his father's he listed among the forces of Canada the Illinois of the Rock.
A large-scale plan of the fort accompanies this map. So minute is the drawing of the plan that it records as a curve in the palisade a projection of the river bank too slight to be shown even on the large-scale modern map. Although the strength ascribed to the surrounding embankment is not confirmed by remains now easily visible, the plan presents the fort in the exact dimensions necessary for defence of this site. It is a worthy complement to the Canadian map of the siege, which interprets without exception and almost with a surveyor's accuracy the military values of all heights and contours of land.60
In a note written alongside the Plan of the Fort of the Fox Savages, Ensign de Villiers detailed the work of builders named only as "they." He imputed to savages a knowledge of military architecture not all of which "they" did possess and which, possessing it, the Foxes could not have (page 153) put to use in the one month permitted to them. He described the plan and the fascined walls of a typical European field redoubt as if copied from French military handbooks. He included in his plan two European bastions, such as neither the Foxes nor any other Algonquian tribes are known ever to have built without European advice or would have consented to use.
The ensign spoke equivocally of the builders. He did not hint that the Foxes may have seized and repaired the old Shawnee fort, one of the four defences that the Sieur de La Salle, master of the Rock in the year 1683, had directed his own allies to raise against the Iroquois.61
These remissions to France were supplemented by the acting Intendant in another letter written in January. Here Hocquart told what the earlier correspondence had omitted- the distance of the battlefield, and therefore by inference of the Foxes' fort, from a known point. The distance that he named was equal to the distance between Fort St. Joseph, near the foot of Lake Michigan, and the Rock. But Hocquart seems to have mistranslated into Parisian French one of the colonial expressions with which Raume had caught his interest in November.
Instead of writing the ambiguous au dessous (below), the well-meaning official wrote au sud (to the south) and performed a triumph of self-contradiction. He located the battle of September 9 "in a plain situated between the River Wabash and the River of the Illinois, about sixty leagues to the south of the extremity or foot of Lake Michigan, to the east southeast of the Rock in the Illinois country."62
Before these letters, long delayed in transmission, could be considered in France, the ministry considered earlier re- (page 154) ports from Quebec. In part answer to the King's memoir of 1731 the Governor and the Intendant (no longer acting Intendant) protested in the autumn of that year against a reprimand just sent them for the expedition of the Straits. They wished reprimand might be balanced by compliment for the success of Lieutenant de Villiers.
So embarrassing had been the words from Versailles that the Governor first changed the color of truth and then bleached out the last tint of it. Already he had reported the gist of his circular directed to commandants. Now he reported it again, with a favorable difference, and he said, "It was in obedience to these orders that the Sieur de Villiers acted and that we have succeeded in almost totally destroying that nation."63
For review by the Council of the colonies in the spring of 1732, Canadian reports on the late affair of the Foxes were put into a shortened form. One result suggests that the Lousianan report was reviewed at the same time. Although Lieutenant de Villiers had been represented by the Canadians, including Lieutenant de Villiers, as responsible alone for success all but complete, the royal memoir of 1732 complimented Governor de Beauharnois with reserve on "the almost total defeat of the Foxes in the battle fought against that nation by the detachment under command of the Sieur de Villiers and of the Sieur de St. Ange."64
The royal memoir that had been prepared for Quebec
in the spring of 1731 spoke of one matter that in the summer of that year sent
the minds of Governor and Intendant on a journey back over events not openly of
record in their reports of 1730. In January, 1731, the India Company had given
up its charter. In July the King was to take Louisianan commerce under his own
control. What now should be the fate of the Illinois country and of the
Illinois tribes?65
_______________________________
44 Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 111-12, 115-16.
45 Blocus du Fort and Plan du Fort. No trace of a battle field appears reported near Streator in the Prairie of the Mascoutens. This name (a pun, Prairie of the Prairie Men) was applied during later decades to Grand Prairie north of the Vermilion River of Vermilion County (Mascoutens' River), but only by the still equivocal Beauharnois to the Piankeshaw hunting grounds south of that Vermilion. The Grand Prairie group of Mascoutens and Kickapoo began removing to the Wabash about 1740. In 1765, and again in 1774, they were reported only at the Wea post. A year or two later they joined the Canadian group of Piankeshaw, established since a quarter century on the Vermilion near the site of Danville. There and on the Sangamon they lived until the nineteenth century treaties sent them west: Illinois State Historical Society, Transactions for 1902, p. 212, Transactions for 1908, p. 189, Journal, VIII, 35, XX, 63, 66, 69, XXI, 297, 301, Collections, pp. 2, 3, XI, 33-34; Indiana Historical Publications, II, 436, 437, 438; Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 149, 222, 336, 382, 448, XVIII, 12, 92, 111, 366-67; Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections, XXXIV, 122, 207-08; Barrows, p. 69, Paullin, plate 29.
46Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 109-13; French text in Steward, 372-74.
47 Gayarre, 449; Steward, 368-69; Canadian Archive Reports for 1905, v. 1, Archives of the Fortifications of the Colonies, part 3, p. 42. The plan as copied in New Orleans, March 26, 1731, now is missing from, or misplaced in, the archives.
48 Cf. use of tenses in the note accompanying the Plan du Fort.
49 Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 113-18.
50 Wisconsin Historical Collections, V, 107-08.
51 J. B. A. Ferland, Cours d'Histoire du Canada (Quebec, 1861-65; 2 v.), II, 430-34; Canadian Archives Reports for 1899, supplement, 130-31, 134.
52 Canadian Archives Reports for 1904, appendix K, 115, 122, 146.
53 Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 119.
54 Steward, 379-82.
55 Canadian Archives Reports for 1899, supplement 39, note; same, for 1904, appendix K, index.
56 Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 120.
57 Rivire de Macopin (Macopine, Macoupin, bear root, arrowleaf, or pickerel weed). The name was applied currently to Crooked Creek near Beardstown; had been applied to the Kankakee-Illinois; is applied today to a small stream near the Illinois River's mouth. See Franquelin's maps of 1683, 1684, 1688; Delisle's map of 1718 in Paullin, plate 24; Charlevoix, letter of Oct. 20, 1721.
58 Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 115.
59 Blocus du Fort (Karpinski Collection) is drawn to about eight degrees of east declension. Tracing in Illinois State Historical Society, Transactions for 1908, p. 254, does not show punctuation of the title.
60 Plan du Fort; Blocus du Fort.
61 Cf. La Salle in Illinois Historical Collections, I, 123; Joutel's MS. map, facsimile in Justin Winsor, Cartier to Frontenac (Boston and New York, 1894), 318-19; Franquelin's own Carte de la Louisiane (Karpinski Collection).
62 Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 129, with reference to the French transcript. For the fond du lac see Margry, II, 82; Charlevoix, letter of August 16, 1721; Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVI, 234.
63 Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 143.
64 Wisconsin Historical Collections, XVII, 154-55.
65 O'Callaghan, IX, 1025; Alvord, 167.
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