The Great Lakes.The Vessels That Plough Them

After this first day of exploration, the real joyous life of the ship comes to one. Every hour of every day is one of pleasure. You are on the only ship in the world into every corner of which a passenger is allowed to go. You are, in so far as your pleasure and freedom go, practically the owner of the ship. The crew and even the captain may not know but what you are one of the owners, for nothing but your name is given to the officers before you come aboard. Of course, the steward has the privilege to tell you to keep out of his kitchen, and the captain for you to keep out of the pilot-house – but they never do it. That guest, for instance, who haunts the pilot-house almost from morning to night, who insists upon taking lessons in steering, and who on any other craft in the world would soon be told to remain in his cabin or mind his business, may be a millionaire himself – a millionaire who is giving this line of ships many thousands of dollars’ worth of freight each year. So the captain and the crew must be affable. But, as I have said before, this is accepted as a pleasure and not as a duty on the Inland Seas. I have taken trips on a score of vessels, and it means much when I say that never have I encountered an unpleasant captain, and that only once did I meet with a mate who was not pleasant to his passengers.

So, from the first day out, the big steel ship is an “open house” to its guests. Forward and aft of the cabins, great awnings are stretched, thick rugs and carpets are spread upon the deck, and easy chairs are scattered about. The captain and his mates are ready with the answers to a thousand questions. They point out objects and locations of interest as they are passed. There, in the late storms of last autumn, a ship went down with all on board; on yonder barren coast, five or six miles away, the captain guides your glasses to the skeleton of a ship, whose tragic story he tells you; he names the lighthouses, the points of coasts, and tells you about the scores of ships you pass each day. He shows you how the wonderful mechanism of the ship is run from the pilot-house, and he gives you lessons in the points of the compass, and perhaps lets you try your hand at the wheel. And each hour, if you have been abroad, you see more and more how an ocean trip cannot be compared to this. In a preceding chapter I have described what you see and what you pass in this thousand-mile journey to Duluth; how you slip from summer to autumn, from the heart of the nation’s population to vast, silent wildernesses where the bear and the wolf roam unmolested; how great cities give place to mining and lumber camps, and you come into the great northern lake where darkness does not settle until after nine o’clock at night.

But these are not the only things which make a trip on a Great Lakes freighter interesting. It is what you can do. There are a dozen games you can play, from hatch-bag to shuffle-board; there is music and reading, eating and drinking – for the steward is constantly alive to your wants, always alive to add to your pleasures. And there is excitement – if not of one kind then of another. You may be thrilled by the sudden alarm of fire aboard ship, and find yourself burning with relief when you discover that you are witnessing nothing but an exciting fire drill; it may be a wrestling or boxing match between two of the ship’s champions, a race over the steel hatches, or – something like the following incident:

One of the greatest sources of entertainment for guests aboard a Lake freighter is in the study of the men and boys of the crew, for the average crew of twenty-five or thirty always possesses some odd characters. Our party was very much amused by one individual, a youth of about twenty, large, round-faced, full-fed, a young man of unbounded good humour whose two great joys in life were his meals – and sleep. This youth never lost an opportunity to take a nap. After his dinner in the mess-room, he would promptly fall into a doze in his chair, to be aroused by a dash of cold water or some other practical joker’s trick; if he sat down on a hatch he would sleep; he would fall asleep leaning against the cabin. His actions caused no little uneasiness on the part of the captain, who liked the boy immensely. “Some day he will fall asleep and topple overboard,” he said.

We had come into Superior, where the clear, dry air exerts a peculiar effect upon one. Coming suddenly from the warm atmosphere of the Lower Lakes a person has difficulty in keeping his eyes open half of the time up there. We were off Keweenaw Point when the thrilling alarm was spread that “Dopey,” the sleepy youth, had fallen overboard. The aft steward brought the news forward. Billy had eaten a huge dinner and was taking a comfortable siesta standing, half leaning over the aft rail. A moment after passing him the steward returned, bent upon stirring the boy from his dangerous position, and found him gone. The vessel was searched from stem to stern. Even the passengers joined in the hunt. But there was found no sign of the missing youth, and a deep gloom fell upon the people of the ship. An hour later, one of the young ladies approached the steep, narrow stair that led down into the forward locker. The mate himself had searched this gloomy nook for Billy. I was a dozen feet behind the girl and she turned to me with a white, startled face.

“Come here – quick!” she cried. “Listen!”

Together we bent our heads over the opening – and up to our ears there came a mysterious sound now so low that we could hardly hear it, then louder – something that for a moment held us speechless and set our hearts beating at double-quick. It was the snoring of a sleeping person! In another instant we were down in that dingy hole of ropes and cables and anchor chains, and there, curled up in the gloom, we found Billy, sleeping a sleep so sound that it took a good shaking to awaken him. On deck he explained the mystery. The passing of the steward aft had aroused him from his nap against the rail, and he had wandered forward, seeking the cool seclusion of the locker.

While this little affair did not end in a tragedy, I give it as an illustration of the fact that something of interest, if not excitement, is constantly occurring to keep the guests of a Great Lakes freighter alive to the possibilities of the trip. The night following Billy’s mysterious disappearance, for instance, the two young ladies aboard our ship nearly brought about a mutiny. Before going into the details of this incident, it is necessary for me to repeat what I have said in a preceding paragraph – that the seamen of our Lakes are the best fed working people in the world. If a captain does not provide the best of meats and vegetables and fruits, and in sufficient quantities, he may find himself minus a crew when he reaches port. One day as I was leaning over the aft rail the steward approached me and said:

“Do you see that ship off there?”

He pointed to a big down-bound freighter.

“Notice anything peculiar about it?” he continued.

I confessed that I did not.

“Well, this is the noon hour,” he went on, “and the sea-gulls always know when it’s feeding time. But there are no gulls following that ship. There are a good many more ships in that same line – and there’s never a gull behind them. Do you know why? It’s because the grub on those boats is so poor. The gulls have learned to tell them as far as they can see ’em, and they won’t have anything to do with ’em, and that’s the Lord’s truth, sir! Any man on the Lakes will tell you so, and the men on those boats most of all. They don’t take a job there until they’re down and out and can’t get work anywhere else.”

On the afternoon of Billy’s adventure, the young lady who discovered him was taken slightly ill and was not present at dinner. Late that night, however, she was much improved – and ravenously hungry. As the steward and his wife were in bed there was no chance of getting anything to eat forward. In some way the girl had learned that a part of the crew, who were in the night watch, had luncheon in the aft mess-room at midnight, and this young lady and her chum, and the three young men in the party, planned to wait until after that hour and then, stealing quietly aft, help themselves to the “leavings.” At twelve-thirty, the decks were dark and silent, with the watch ahead of the forward deck-houses, and the young people made their way unobserved to the mess-room. Not a soul was about, and on the table was meat and cake and pickles, and a huge pot of coffee was simmering on the range. The five helped themselves. No one interrupted them, and when fifteen or twenty minutes later they slipped back to their quarters the table was pretty well cleaned. Now it just happened that the night men, instead of eating at midnight, ate at one– an hour later, and when they came in after six hours of hard work, tired and hungry, only the wreck of what should have been, greeted their astonished eyes. The men were in a rage. They had been imposed upon as no self-respecting, liberty-loving man of the Lakes will allow himself to be imposed upon – in the way of food; and it took the combined efforts of the two stewards and their wives, and the humble apologies of the three young men, to straighten the affair out. Thereafter, at midnight, the mess-room door was locked.

The more one comes in touch and sympathy with the lives of these men of the Lakes the more one’s interest increases; and it is not until one eats and drinks with them aft, and secures their confidence and friendship, that he is let into the secrets of the inner and home life of these red-blooded people, which is unlike the life of any other seafaring men in the world. It is when this confidence and friendship is won that you begin to reap the full pleasure of a trip on a Great Lakes freighter; it is then that the romance, the picturesqueness, and the superstition of the Lake breed creep out. Not until that time, for instance, will you discover that these rough strong men of the Lakes are the most indomitable home-owners in the world. A home is their ambition, the goal toward which they constantly work. From the deckhand to the young, unmarried mate it is the reward of all their labour, the end for which they are all striving. And there are good reasons for this – reasons which have made the “home instinct” among Lake sailors almost a matter of heredity. The ships of the Inland Seas are almost constantly in sight of land. Now it is a long stretch of coast a mile or so away; again it is a point stretching out to sea, or the shores of some of the most beautiful streams in America. And wherever there is land within shouting or megaphone or “whistle” distance of the passing vessels, there nestle the little homes of those who run the ships of our fresh-water marine. It may be that for an entire season of seven or eight months the Lake sailor has no opportunity of visiting his family. Yet every week or so he sees his home and his wife and children from the deck of his ship. It is easy for those ashore to learn from the marine officers when a certain vessel is due to pass, and at that hour wives and sweethearts, friends and children, assemble on the shore to bid their loved ones Godspeed. All of the vessels on the Lakes have their private code of signals. Perhaps in the still hours of night, the sleeping wife is aroused by the deep, distant roar of the freighter’s voice. For a moment she listens, and it comes again – and from out there in the night she knows that her husband is talking to her; and the husband, his eyes turned longingly ashore, sees a light suddenly flash in the darkness, and his heart grows lighter and happier in this token of love and faith that has come to him. And in the hours of day it is more beautiful still; and the passengers and crew draw away, leaving the man alone at the rail, while the wife holds up their baby for the father to see, and throws him kisses; and there is the silence of voiceless, breathless suspense on the deck that the faint voice of the woman, or the happy cries of the children, may reach the husband and father, whose words thunder back in megaphone greeting. It is beautiful and yet it is pathetic, this constant union of the people of the Lake breed. And the pathos comes mostly when there is no answer from the little home ashore, for it is then that visions of sickness, of misfortune, and possibly of neglect cast their gloom.

In a hundred other ways that I might describe does one see life on a Great Lakes freighter as on none of the vessels of the salt seas. It is a life distinct from all others, a life that is building a people within itself – the people of the Lake breed.

PART II

Origin and History of the Lakes

I

Origin and Early History

While the modern romance of the Great Lakes, the vast commerce that has grown upon them, the great cities along their shores, and the part they have played in the history of the last generation form, to my mind, one of the most absorbing and at the same time one of the most fruitful subjects for the writer of to-day, it is to the “dim and mysterious ages of long ago” that one must allow his imagination to be carried, if he would understand, in its fullest measure, the part that our Inland Seas should hold within the hearts of the American people. It has been my desire, in this volume, to establish between our people and our Lakes that bond of friendship which unfortunately has never existed except upon their very shores. In the years in which I have studied the Lakes, their commerce, and their people, I have been astonished at the dearth of material which has been published about them, and not until this discovery came upon me forcefully did I understand that our own glorious Inland Seas, holding in perpetual inheritance for the American people one half of the fresh water of the whole globe, are, indeed, “aliens in the land of their birth.”

For this reason, I am adding to my preceding chapters a brief history of the Lakes. It is not what might be called a history in detail, for such a story of the Inland Seas would fill volumes in itself. No other portion of the globe has been fraught with more incident of historical and romantic interest than these fresh-water heritages of our nation. The dramas that have been played upon them or along their shores would fill libraries. Their unrevealed pages of romance and tragedy would furnish rich material for the writers of a century. About them lie the dust of three quarters of the aboriginal inhabitants of North America. Along their shores were fought some of the world’s most relentless wars of absolute extermination. Upon their waters occurred the most romantic adventures of the early exploration of the continent. Every mile of these waters, now clouded with the smoke of a gigantic commerce, is fraught with the deepest historical interest. And yet, as I write this, there comes to my mind a thought of those countless thousands of Americans who, travelling afar for their pleasures, seek in every quarter of the globe that their feet may tread in awesome respect upon spots hallowed because of their historical associations, whether those associations be of fact, of legend, or of song.

The romance of the Lakes does not begin with their early discoverers; neither does it begin with the primitive inhabitants along their shores. It dawns with their making. Unnumbered thousands of years ago, before the glaciers of the Ice Age crept over the continent; when prehistoric monsters, still living in a tropical world, roamed throughout what is now the Lake region; and when man, if he existed at all, was in his crudest form, the Great Lakes were still unborn. Where their ninety-five thousand square miles of surface now afford the world’s greatest highways of water commerce there were then vast areas of plain, of highland and plateau, rising at times to the eminence of mountains. Those were the days when the North American continent was completing itself, when the last handiwork in the creation of a world was in progress. In place of the Lakes there were then a number of great rivers in these regions – rivers, which despite the passing of ages, have left their channels and their marks to this day. These rivers were all of one system and were all tributary to one great stream, the Laurentian River, whose channel to the sea was that of the St. Lawrence of to-day. Were it possible for one to conceive himself back in those primitive times a journey over this first great river system of the continent would have carried him, first of all, from the still unfinished ocean along the south shore of what is now Lake Ontario. He would have travelled within ten miles of where scores of towns and cities now flourish, and almost directly opposite what is now the Niagara River he would have encountered another great stream pouring into the Laurentian from the south and west. This river continued almost through the middle of what is now Lake Erie, and opposite where Sandusky is now situated divided itself into two branches, which still exist in the Maumee and the Detroit. The Laurentian continued northward close along the southern shore of Georgian Bay, turned southward to the centre of the Lake Huron basin, where the Huronian River, sweeping across central Michigan, joined it from Saginaw Bay. The Laurentian itself passed northward through the Straits of Mackinaw and terminated in what is now Lake Michigan. The story of this vast water system has been left in clearly defined outlines; its indelible marks are ancient valleys, sand-filled channels of the great streams, and worn escarpments. Seldom has science had an easier story to read of ages that are gone.

Then came the second step in the creating of the Lakes of to-day. Slowly life changed as the Glacial Age approached, and with the sweeping back of life the rivers, too, passed out of existence. During the slow passing of centuries, their channels were filled, and the valleys were obstructed with drift, so that when the Ice Age had come and gone their channels no longer ran clear and unobstructed to the sea. As a consequence, great areas were submerged, and hundreds of thousands of square miles of what is now fertile land, populated by millions and dotted by cities, became an ocean. But the continent was still in process of formation. The land in the Lake region began to rise, and continued in its elevation until out of the chaos of sea the Lakes were formed. To the north-east, as the centre of the continent rose, there was a tilting of the land oceanward, and this warping dropped Lake Ontario below the level of the other Lakes, thus interposing a barrier to free communication to the sea and giving birth to Niagara Falls.

In this way, so far as science can tell, the Great Lakes of to-day were brought into existence. How early human life existed along their shores it is impossible even to guess, but that the earliest life of the continent should first of all gather in the valleys of the vast water system that gave them birth, and afterward reassemble along their shores, is highly probable. The earliest discoverers to penetrate into the wildernesses of the West found these shores inhabited by powerful nations. Other nations were facing extermination. Still others had ceased to exist and were forgotten except in legend. Along the Inland Seas have been found evidences of a superior race to the warlike aborigines of the days of La Salle. But only these evidences, utensils of copper and stone and clay, remain as proof of their existence. What they were, when they lived, and how they died, is one of the mysteries that will remain forever unsolved.

By the time the known history of the Lakes really begins their inhabitants had degenerated into warlike, ferocious savages, bent upon battle and extermination, and for the most part constantly embroiled in war of one kind or another. From Lake Ontario to the end of Superior the Lake regions were one great battle-ground, and this sanguinary history had extended so far into the past that with the coming of the first French explorers the Indians could give no comprehensive idea of when it had begun. At this time, early in the seventeenth century, the Lake country was the bone of contention among three quarters of the aborigines of North America. There was hardly a tribe that was not fighting some one of its neighbours, and the remnants of vanquished nations were constantly fleeing from their enemies and escaping total extermination by seeking safety in the West and South. In Northern Michigan and in Wisconsin there lived three branches of the Algonquin tribe, the Ottawas, the Ojibwas, and the Pottawatomies. The Ottawas had been driven westward, and the Ojibwas at this time were invading the hunting grounds of the Crees, who were entrenched on the northern shore of Lake Superior, their territory extending northward to Hudson Bay. On their west, the Ojibwas were also at war with the powerful Dakotas, who, fighting eastward from the Mississippi, had secured a foothold on Superior. To the eastward, encroaching upon the tribes of Lake Ontario, were the Iroquois, or Five Nations, consisting of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and the Senecas. Between these and the fierce Algonquins of the Upper Lakes were wedged the Hurons and the Eries, fighting vainly against the almost total extermination which became their fate a little later. It was in the war between 1650 and 1655 that both the Eries and the Neuters, on the southern shore of Lake Erie, were wiped out of existence by the Iroquois, and it was about this same time that the Hurons received their death-blow. The few that escaped fled to the Mississippi and promptly became involved in a war with the Sioux. Reduced to a pitiable remnant the once powerful Sacs and Foxes were awaiting their end along Green Bay.

In these days, the Lakes were already playing a part in commerce as well as in war. Great fleets of Indian canoes made annual voyages from the Upper to the Lower Lakes, and war fleets were common spectacles from almost every coast. The greatest of these fleets, so far as is known, was that of the Iroquois, which in 1680 carried six hundred selected braves across Lake Erie, up the Detroit River, through Lake St. Clair, Lake Huron, the Straits of Mackinaw, and down to the foot of Lake Michigan, where the adventurous navigators were utterly repulsed by the warriors of the Illinois. Another Iroquois fleet was annihilated near Iroquois Point, in Lake Huron. In 1600, according to stories told by the Indians, a fierce naval battle in which several hundred war canoes were engaged was fought in the middle of Lake Erie by the Wyandots and the Senecas. Only one Seneca canoe escaped.

It was at this time, when the Lake country and the Lakes themselves were the stage upon which were being played the most thrilling dramas of aboriginal history, that the Inland Seas were first visited by their white discoverers. In 1615, the Franciscan friar, Joseph Le Caron, in company with three other Franciscans and twelve Frenchmen, invaded the seat of the Huron nation on Matchedash Bay, where Champlain joined him a few days later. The Hurons were preparing to attack their old enemies, the Iroquois, and Champlain accompanied them on their expedition. The campaign was unsuccessful but it led to the Frenchman’s discovery of Lake Ontario. Stephen Brule, an unlettered and reckless adventurer, was the first white man to rest eyes upon Lake Superior, his voyage up Lake Huron being made some time in 1629. Brule, however, was more interested in ingots of copper which he found than in the greatest body of fresh water on the globe, and he returned south almost immediately, while it was left for Raymbault and Jogues, two hopeful missionaries in search of a passage to China, to make the first navigation of Superior. This they did in 1641. Five years after Brule’s discovery, another adventurer, Jean Nicolet, paddled in a birch canoe from Georgian Bay across Lake Huron and through the Straits of Mackinaw, and thus discovered Lake Michigan. As surprising as it may seem, Erie was the last of the Great Lakes to be found by white men, and although its existence was known to the French as early as 1640, it was not until 1669 that Joliet, its discoverer, made his voyage upon it.

The situation as it existed in the entire Lake country at the time of the coming of these first explorers was so unreasonably tragic that, viewed from the present day, it approaches dangerously near to having a touch of the comic about it. As one early writer says, “It was as if a pack of dogs were fighting over a bone. Only – where was the bone?” There was hardly an Indian tribe that was not at war with some other tribe, and in most instances, according to the discoverers, there were no evident causes for the sanguinary conflicts. “It was as if all the savages were impelled by a bad spirit, and a rage of extermination was sweeping over the land,” wrote one of the early Fathers. It is a popular superstition that the extinction of the red man must be ascribed to the coming of the white, but nothing shows more graphically the error of this belief than these conditions of the seventeenth century in the Lake country. The aborigines were exterminating themselves. They were doing the work completely, mercilessly. Nations had already been put out of existence. The Eries and Neuters were but lately annihilated. The once powerful Hurons were reduced to a remnant. The Sacs and Foxes were doomed. Existing tribes were weakened and scattered by ceaseless war. And sweeping down from the east the all-powerful Iroquois, the Romans of the wilderness, were coming each year to add to the completeness of the extermination.

Now came the whites, and with their presence there developed slowly a check to the indiscriminate slaughter. At no time in the world was the missionary spirit more active, and scores of the disciples of the Church plunged fearlessly into the wilderness of the Lake regions, daring their perils of starvation and torture and death that the word of God might reach the hearts of the savages. And with them there came hundreds of adventurous spirits, trappers employed by the “Hundred Associates,” fortune-hunters, and reckless souls who had no other object than the excitement of exploration and discovery, but all of whom were staunch Catholics. The very fearlessness of these white invaders acted as a governor on the hostile energies of the savages, and their interests, in a small way at first, began to be diverted into other channels than those of war. Among the neutral nations on the Niagara River, Father Joseph de la Roche d’Aillon formed a mission early in the seventeenth century. As early as 1615, the Recollects had established a mission among the Hurons, which was later continued by the Jesuits. For more than thirty years, the missionaries had laboured among the Hurons when, in 1648, the Senecas and Mohawks fell upon their country, razed twenty of their villages, killed most of their 3000 fighters, and totally destroyed them as a people. Two of the Jesuit Fathers, Brébeuf and Daniel, gave up their lives in the fearful massacres of those days. It was only five years later that the Iroquois, destroyers of the Hurons, requested the French to send missionaries among them, and for nearly twenty years the zealous Jesuits brought about a lull in the sanguinary conflicts of the Five Nations, but at the end of that time when war flamed out anew they were compelled to abandon their missions. Meanwhile, along the Upper Lakes, the missionary movement was being prosecuted with extreme vigour. Garreau and Claude Allouez, with other missionaries, worked along the shores of Superior, establishing missions among the Sacs and Foxes and Pottawatomies. In 1668, Marquette established his famous mission at Sault Ste. Marie, and three years later founded the mission of St. Ignace on the Straits of Mackinaw.

It would take a volume to describe the adventures of these early Fighters of the Faith, their trials and sacrifices, their successes and failures. The briefness of our sketch compels us to move quickly from these absorbing scenes to the first great event in the history of Lake navigation, and to the beginning of that encroachment of the English which was to develop a hundred years of war along the Inland Seas. While the Jesuit Fathers were sacrificing their lives among the savages and while the Indian wars of extermination were still in progress, the French farther east had already begun to feel the hostile influence of the English. To check this influence La Salle and Count Frontenac brought about the erection of Fort Frontenac, in 1673, on the present site of Kingston. At this time, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, a young man of eminence and learning, was of the supreme faith that he was destined to discover a water passage through the American continent to China and Japan, and the building of Fort Frontenac was only the first step in the gigantic scheme which he planned to carry out. A part of this scheme was the building of a vessel of considerable size in which La Salle planned not only to make a complete tour of the Lakes but in which he hoped to discover the route that would lead to the Orient. Five years later, the young adventurer made the portage around Niagara Falls, and at the mouth of Cayuga Creek, in Niagara County, New York, where is now located the town of La Salle, he began the construction of the first vessel ever to sail the Inland Seas.

There are different estimates as to the size of the ship, but that it was somewhere between fifty and sixty tons there is little doubt. Assisting in this work were Tonty and Hennepin, and it took all of the persuasive powers of the three to keep the Griffin, as the vessel had been named, from the hostile hands of the Senecas as she lay in her stocks. The ship, when launched, was completely rigged, found with supplies for a long voyage, and armed by seven pieces of cannon and a quantity of muskets. She carried two masts and a jib, and was decorated with the usual ornaments of an ancient ship of war, including a flying griffin at the jib-boom and a huge eagle aft. For hundreds of miles about, the Indians came to see this wonderful “floating fort” before she set sail. Thirty-two souls were to form the crew of the Griffin in her adventurous search for the route to Cathay, and on the day that she turned her prow up the Niagara River, La Salle and his followers fell upon their knees, invoking upon themselves the mercies of God in an undertaking which, they believed, was to be one of the most venturesome of their age. With all on board singing the Te Deum Laudamus, the Griffin passed into Lake Erie, and while at the sight of the great water ahead of them the priests again invoked the blessings of God, the first ship to sail the Lakes boldly headed into those “vast and unknown seas of which even their savage inhabitants knew not the end.”

According to the historian Hennepin, who was a member of the expedition, days and nights of the wildest speculation, of hope, of fear, and of anxious anticipation now followed. Rumour filled the seas ahead of them with innumerable perils. The hardy navigators knew not at what instant destruction might overtake them in any one of a dozen ways in which they supposed themselves to be threatened. Each morning and night the entire crew joined in prayers and in singing the hymns of the Church. Lake Erie was crossed in safety, and on the eleventh of August the Griffin entered the Detroit River. Hennepin was enthralled with its wonderful beauty. “The river was thirty leagues long,” he says, “bordered by low and level banks, and navigable throughout its entire length. On either side were vast prairies, extending back to hills covered with vines, fruit trees, thickets, and tall forest trees, so distributed as to seem rather the work of art than nature.” Passing between Grosse Isle and Bois Blanc Island, the Griffin sailed slowly up the river, frequent stops being made along its course; it passed the present site of Detroit, and on the day of the festival of Saint Claire the navigators entered the lake which they gave that name. On the twenty-third of August, the Griffin entered into Lake Huron, the Franciscans chanting the Te Deum for the third time, and the entire crew joining in offering up thanks to the Almighty for the smiling fortune that had thus far accompanied them on their voyage.

Crossing Saginaw Bay the Griffin lay for two days among the Thunder Bay islands and then continued her way into the North. Almost immediately after this, La Salle and his companions were caught in a terrific storm, and in the height of its fury, when it was thought that the end had come and that all the demons of this mysterious world were working their destruction, La Salle made a vow that if God would deliver them he would erect a chapel in Louisiana to the memory of St. Anthony de Padua, the tutelary saint of the sailor. As if in response to this vow, the wind subsided and the storm-beaten Griffin found shelter in Michilimackinac Bay, where a mission had been built among the Ottawas. Early in September, the Griffin sailed into Lake Michigan and continued to Washington Island, at the entrance to Green Bay. Here a party of missionaries and traders had been established for a year. They had collected a large quantity of furs, valued at about twelve thousand dollars, and La Salle changed his original plans and sent the Griffin back to Niagara with this treasure, with the idea of continuing his own exploration by canoe.

On the eighteenth of September, 1679, La Salle bade adieu to the Griffin and her crew, and from the point of a headland watched her white sails until they dropped below the horizon. It was the last he ever heard or saw of the ship. No sign of her was ever afterward found, no soul who sailed with her lived to tell the story of her tragic end. In the years that followed, it was rumoured that Indians boarded and destroyed her, and massacred her crew. Hennepin was of the opinion that she was lost in a storm. Others believed that some of her crew had mutinied and that after murdering their companions they had joined the Ottawas, where they met their own fate. From time to time in recent years, relics have been found along the Lakes which have revived stories of the mysterious disappearance of the Griffin, but none of these finds have yet thrown reasonable light upon the tragic end of this first vessel to navigate the Inland Seas and of the venturesome spirits who manned her. By all but a few the Griffin is forgotten, or has never been known. Yet by the millions who live along the Great Lakes she should be held in much the same reverence as are the caravels of Columbus by the whole nation.

II

The Lakes Change Masters

For more than a hundred years after the sailing of the Griffin the Great Lakes and the country about them were destined to be the scenes of almost ceaseless war. The fury of the internecine strife of the Indians was on the wane. Their conflicts of extermination had worked their frightful end and it now came time for them to give up the red arena of the Inland Seas to other foes, among whom the last vestiges of their power were doomed to melt away like snow under the warmth of the sun. For unnumbered generations they had fought among themselves. Nations of red men had been born, and nations had died. The Lake regions were white with their bones and red with their blood, and now those that remained of them were to be used as pawns in the games of war between the English and the French, among whom they were still to play an important though a fatal part.

The romantic voyage of the Griffin marked that era when the French were gaining possession of the Lakes. Eight years before La Salle’s expedition, Simon Francis Daumont had taken formal possession of the Inland Seas in the presence of seventeen different Indian nations. In 1761, a fort had been erected at Mackinaw, and Daniel Deluth, after whom the city of Duluth was named, planted a colony of French soldiers among the Sioux and Assiniboines of Minnesota. From this time on, the power of the French steadily gained in ascendancy and the work of winning the allegiance of the Indians progressed for a number of years without interruption. In 1686, Fort Duluth was built on the St. Clair River, and fifteen years later, in 1701, Cadillac built a fort on the present site of Detroit, which was destined to play a picturesque and important part in the century of war that was to follow. Other forts of the French were at Michilimackinac (Mackinac), Chicago, Green Bay, and on the Niagara River. Nearly all of the Indians of the Lake regions had become their allies, with the exception of the Iroquois. The forests and streams were the haunts of French traders. The Church was establishing itself more and more firmly among the tribes. The adventurous trappers of the fur companies were even living among the savages, and there was fast developing between the red men and the French that bond of friendship which was to remain almost unbroken through all of the troublous times that were to follow. The power of France, at this time, seemed bound to rule the destinies of the Inland Seas.

On the other hand, the Iroquois were the implacable enemies of the French and their allies, and the friends of the English. They were distributed over a territory which embraced the Lake Ontario regions and which extended to the English settlements of the East, thus offering a free and safe road of travel to English traders into the domains of the French. Reduced to less than a quarter of the fighting strength that they had possessed before the wars of extermination, they were still the terror of all other Lake tribes, and the English were not slow to take advantage of the opportunities which their friendship offered them. At every possible point the Five Nations checked the movements of the French, and at the same time assisted the English traders to invade their territory. In 1684, De la Barre, then Governor of Canada, determined to destroy this last menace to French dominion, and sent word throughout the Lake regions calling upon his warrior allies to assemble at Niagara for a great war of extermination upon the Iroquois. De la Barre himself proceeded to Lake Ontario with a powerful force of nearly two thousand men, but an epidemic of sickness attacked his army and the only result of the “campaign of extermination” was a peaceful conference with the Oneidas, Onondagas, and Cayugas.

The failure of De la Barre’s plans was the first great blow to French dominion. The English traders became more daring and parties penetrated even as far as Michilimackinac, one of the French strongholds. These traders were regarded as fair game by the French wherever found, but though several parties were captured the invasion from the East did not cease. Alarmed at the growing danger, the French determined to make another campaign against the Iroquois. To the existence of the Five Nations they ascribed their peril. With these fierce warriors out of the way they could easily hold the English back.

In 1687, the Marquis Denonville, who had succeeded De la Barre, gathered two thousand troops and six hundred Indian warriors at Montreal, and with the advice that a thousand Indian allies would meet him at Niagara set out for the land of the Iroquois. On June 23d, the forces met at Fort Frontenac and from there proceeded to Irondequoit, in the enemy’s country. Only the Senecas, one branch of the Five Nations, had gathered to meet the invaders, and in the fierce battle that followed, the French and their allies were defeated and driven to the shores of the lake. Satisfied with their victory, the Senecas did not press the invaders, and Denonville took advantage of his opportunity to build Fort Niagara, after which he led the remnant of his defeated army back to Montreal, leaving a garrison of one hundred men in the new stronghold. During the winter that followed, the Senecas besieged the fort with such success that less than a dozen of its defenders escaped with their lives.

News of the defeat of the French spread like wildfire. It penetrated to the farthest fastnesses of the known wildernesses. English traders began to swarm into the Lower Lake regions. The Indian nations allied to the French were thrown into a panic. The war spirit of the Iroquois was aroused to a feverish height by their victory, and they swarmed to the invasion of the French dominions. Fort Frontenac was captured and burned. Both the allies and the French were swept back with tremendous slaughter, and their power upon the Lower Lakes was broken. “It seemed,” said an early writer, “as if the Five Nations would sweep over the entire Lake country, driving all enemies from their shores, and thus delivering into the hands of the English all that the French had gained.”

But, in this hour of victory, the shadow of doom was hovering over the martial people of the Five Nations. For unnumbered years the conquerors of the New World, the time had at last come for their fall. The War of the Palatinate was at hand, and the hostilities of the French and the English spread to land and sea. Rumours came that Frontenac was about to sweep down upon New York, and the faithful Iroquois turned back to defend the city of their White Father. They threw themselves between the invaders and their friends, an unconquerable barrier. New York was saved, but in the struggle the power of the Five Nations was broken. For many years they still remained a force to be reckoned with, but as the conquering Romans of the Wilderness and the terror of a score of nations, extending even to the Mississippi, their history was at an end. In their passing it must be said that a braver man, a truer friend, or a more relentless foe never existed on the American continent than the Iroquois warrior.

There now came a brief lull in the warfare of the Lakes. The end of the War of the Palatinate was closely followed by Queen Anne’s War, but hostilities did not openly break out along the Inland Seas. The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 left France technically in possession of the Lakes, but, even after this treaty, the English claimed as a sort of inheritance from the Iroquois the regions of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. This fact again gave opportunity for plenty of excitement and trouble. The French had rebuilt Fort Frontenac and were establishing other strongholds, their object being to hem the English along their seacoast possessions by means of a string of forts extending from Canada southward. To frustrate these designs Governor Burnett, of New York, began the erection of a trading-post at Oswego in 1720. The French at once reciprocated by rebuilding Fort Niagara of stone, whereupon, in 1727, the English added a strong fort to their holdings in Oswego. This all but started active hostilities again. Beauharnois, the Governor of Canada, flew into a high dudgeon, sent a written demand for the English to abandon the fort, and threatened to demolish it unless this was done. The response of the English was to strengthen their garrison. Instead of carrying out his threat of war, Beauharnois began the strengthening of all the French forts, a work which continued for several years. Meanwhile the French trappers, traders, and priests of the Upper Lakes had been stirring the passions of the Indians against the encroaching English. The latter, in 1755, built two warships on Lake Ontario, and it was pointed out to the Western tribes that these were two of the terrible engines that were intended to work their destruction. By the time of the breaking out of the Seven Years’ War, the French, though their population was less than a tenth of that of their enemies, were splendidly prepared for war.

Actual operations in this last struggle between the French and the English for the possession of the Lakes began in 1756, when De Lery and De Villier set out with some six hundred men to capture Oswego and other forts. On the Onondaga River, De Villier encountered Bradstreet and his English and was completely defeated, more than a hundred of his men being killed. Meanwhile, from Fort Frontenac, General Montcalm was preparing to descend upon Oswego, and on the ninth of August, 1756, he arrived in sight of the English stronghold with three thousand men under his command. On the twelfth the battle began. From the beginning it was a surprise to both combatants. The victory of the French was comparatively easy and complete. The English loss was one hundred and fifty killed and wounded. Nearly two thousand prisoners were taken, one hundred and twenty cannon and mortars, six war vessels, and an immense amount of stores and ammunition. The blow was a terrific one for the English. Oswego had been their Gibraltar. In it were their shipbuilding yard, nearly all of their heavy ordnance, and a large part of the stores that were to supply them during the war. For the first time, the English realised what a terrible loss they had sustained in the breaking of the power of the Five Nations.

It was not until 1758 that the English regained a little of their lost prestige. Everywhere the French had been victorious. But, in the summer of this year, Colonel Bradstreet attacked Fort Frontenac with thirty-five hundred men, and after two days of battle the garrison surrendered. This was as decisive a blow to the French as was the loss of Oswego to the English. Ten thousand barrels of supplies, nearly a hundred cannon, and five vessels were destroyed. The French now saw that the beginning of the end was at hand. Little Fort Niagara was burned the following year to keep it from falling into the hands of their enemies, and a little later Fort Niagara surrendered. At this time French reinforcements were on their way to Niagara, but hearing of the fall of this last stronghold the ships which bore them were destroyed at the northern end of Grand Island, in a bay which from that time has been known as Burnt Ship Bay, and at the bottom of which, until a comparatively short time ago, the remains of the old vessels were plainly to be seen. With the fall of Montreal in 1760, the last flag of the French passed from the Great Lakes. Their warships were scuttled, their forts in the North surrendered, and within a few months England was everywhere supreme along the Inland Seas.

There now followed a curious and absorbingly interesting phase of Lake history. The English had conquered the French – but they had not conquered the red allies. The warriors of the Upper Lakes could not be made to understand the situation. “We fight until there are none of us left to fight,” they said. “Why is it that our French brothers have run? Shall we run because they have run? We were their friends and brothers. We are their friends now, and though you have conquered them we will still fight for them, so long as there are among us men who can fight.” A more beautiful illustration of the friendship and loyalty of the Indian warrior could hardly be conceived than this.

And it was largely this loyalty, this loyalty to a race that had been destroyed in their regions, that was to result in those terrible wars and massacres which marked the course of English rule along the Lakes, almost as regularly as mile-posts mark the course of a road. In the hearts of the savages there was an intense, ineradicable hatred of the English. They, and not the French, were regarded as the usurpers and despoilers of the country. This hatred was even greater than that of the Five Nations toward the French. It was something, as one old writer says, “beyond description, beyond the power to measure.”

In these days, a fearful fate was rolling up slowly for the string of forts along the Inland Seas, a doom that came without warning and with terrible completeness. At the head of the great conspiracy which was to result in the destruction of all the forts held by the English, with the exception of that at Detroit, was Chief Pontiac. On May 16, 1763, the first blow fell. By what was called treachery on the part of the Indians, but what would be termed stratagem in a white man’s war, Fort Sandusky was captured and its entire garrison, with the exception of one man, was massacred. Meanwhile a band of Pottawatomies from Detroit had hurried to the fort at the mouth of St. Joseph’s River, at the head of Lake Michigan, and, on the morning of the twenty-fifth, killed the whole of its garrison with the exception of three. Eight days later Michilimackinac (Mackinac) fell. On the morning of this fatal day, a large party of Ojibwas were to play a game of ball with the Sacs, and not a breath of suspicion filled the breasts of the doomed officers and men. Discipline was relaxed on account of the game. Excitement ran high. The Indians were in the best of spirits, and had never seemed more friendly. Their sole thought seemed to be of the great game. Scores of blanketed squaws and old men had assembled, and these, without creating suspicion, had gathered close to the open gates. The game began, and the shouting, struggling savages rushed this way and that in pursuit of the ball. Now they would surge far from the stockade, now so close that they would crush against its pickets. Suddenly the ball shot high into the air and fell inside the fort, and a hundred yelling savages rushed to the gates. Instantly the scene was changed. The squaws and the old men threw back their blankets and gave hatchets and guns to the warriors as they rushed past them. Within a few minutes, seventeen men were killed and the rest of the garrison were prisoners. Five of these prisoners were afterward killed by their captors. The fate of the garrison at Presque Isle was less terrible. For two days, the defenders of the fort held off the savages and then surrendered upon the promise that their lives would be spared. The prisoners were carried to Detroit.