Reuben Gold Thwaites

“ The English were not desirous of settling the Western wilderness with farmers, thereby driving out the game. Our people, however, have always been of a land-grabbing temper; we have sought to beat down the walls of savagery, to push settlement, to cut down the forests, to plow the land, to drive the Indian out. This meant the death of the fur trade; hence it is small wonder that, when the Revolutionary War broke out, the French and Indians of the Northwest upheld the British and opposed the Americans. ”

“ When the village council decided to do something, any man might, if he wished, refuse to obey. It was seldom that an entire tribe, consisting of several villages, united in an important undertaking; still more unusual was it, for several tribes to unite. This was, of course, a weak organization, such as a pure democracy is sure to be. The Indian lacked self-control and steadfastness of purpose, and the tribes and villages were jealous of one another; so they yielded before the whites, who better understood the value of union in the face of a common foe. ”

“ In the cities of Green Bay, Kaukauna, Portage, and Prairie du Chien, and the dreamy little Fox River hamlet of Grand Butte des Morts, are still to be found little closely-knit colonies of French Creoles, descendants of those who lived and ruled under the old French régime.
The time must come, in the molding of all the foreign elements in our midst into the American of the future, when the French element will no longer exist among us as an element, but merely as a memory. ”

“ When white men first came to our land, the Indian trails formed a network of narrow, deep-sunken paths over the face of the country, as they connected village with village, and these with the hunting and fishing resorts of the aborigines. Many of the most important trails simply followed the still earlier tracks of the buffalo, which in great herds wandered from plain to plain, in search of forage, or in hiding from man, through the dark forest and over the hills. ”

“ All between was savagery: here and there a squalid Indian village, with its conical wigwams of bark or matted reeds, pitched on the shore of a lake, at the foot of a portage trail, or on the banks of a forest stream. Now and then a French trading party passed along the frozen trails, following the natives on the hunt and poisoning their minds against the newcomers, who were struggling to make their poor old stockade a fairly decent shelter against the winter storms. ”

“ No wilderness so far away that the little French fiddle had not been there; the Indians recognized it as a part of the furniture of every fur trader's camp. Music appealed strongly to these warm natures, and the songs of the voyageurs, as they propelled their canoes along the Wisconsin rivers, always greatly interested travelers. French Canadians are still living in Wisconsin, who remember those gay melodies which echoed through our forests a hundred years ago. ”

“ With the French, most of our Wisconsin Indians were quite friendly. The French were kind and obliging, often married and settled among them, and had no thought of driving them away. They throve upon the fur trade with the Indians, and in general did not care to become farmers. The English and the Americans, on the contrary, felt a contempt for the savages, and did not disguise it; the aim of the Americans, in particular, was gradually to clear the forest, to make farms, and to build villages. In the American scheme of civilization the Indian had no part. ”

“ A more competent official system of scientifically caring for our forests, restricting the present wasteful cutting of timber, and preventing and fighting forest fires, would be of incalculable benefit to the State of Wisconsin. The annual loss by burning is alone a terrible drain upon the resources of the people, to say nothing of the death and untold misery which stalk in the wake of a forest fire. ”

“ They experienced a number of thrilling adventures with Indians, both as traders to the forest camps of savages friendly to New France, and as prisoners in the hands of the French-hating Iroquois of New York. Nevertheless they had grown accustomed to the hard, perilous life of the wilderness, and were thoroughly in love with it. ”

“ They leave in their wake great wastes of land, some of it covered with dead branches from the trees that have been felled and trimmed; some so sterile that the sun, now allowed to enter, in a rainless summer bakes the earth and dries the spongy swamps; while all about are great masses of dead stumps, blasted trunks, and other forest débris. Settlers soon pour in, purchase the best of this cut-over land, and clear the ground for farms. But there are still left in Wisconsin great stretches of deforested country, as yet unsettled ”

“ Slowly they felt their way along the northern shores of Lake Huron, where the pine forests sweep majestically down to the water's edge, or crown the bold cliffs, while southward the green waters of the inland sea stretch away to the horizon. Storms too severe for their frail craft frequently detained them on the shore, and daily they sought food in the forest. ”

“ The American backwoodsmen were ambushed, many of the blockhouse posts were burned, prisoners were subjected to nameless horrors, and it seemed as if pandemonium had broken loose. By the close of the year, such had been the rush of settlers back to their old homes, east of the mountains, that but five or six hundred frontiersmen remained in all Kentucky. Had the British and the Indians succeeded in driving back all of the settlers, they would have held the whole interior of the continent, and the American republic might never have been permitted to grow beyond the Alleghanies and the Blue Ridge ”

“ There are, all things considered, no abler, more forceful men in the Wisconsin of to-day than were some of those, now practically all passed away, who shaped her destinies in the fourth and fifth decades of the nineteenth century.
The sessions of the legislature were the principal events of the year. Prominent men from all over Wisconsin were each winter attracted to Madison, as legislators, lobbyists, or visitors, crowding the primitive little hotels and indulging in rather boisterous gayety; for humor in those pioneer days was often uncouth. ”

“ Wisconsin was then a part of Indiana Territory, of which William Henry Harrison was governor. It was for the most part a wilderness; dense woods and tenantless prairies extended all the way from the narrow clearing at Green Bay to the little settlement at Prairie du Chien. There were small clearings at Portage, Milwaukee, and one or two other fur trading posts. There was no civil government here, and the few white people in all this vast stretch of country practically made their own laws, each man being judge and jury for himself, so long as he did not interfere with other people's rights. ”

“ THE WINNEBAGO WAR
The world over, white men, representing a higher type of civilization, have wrested, or are still wresting, the land from the original savage occupants. This seems to be inevitable. It is one of the means by which civilization is being extended over the entire globe. We glory in the progress of civilization; but we are apt to ignore the hardship which this brings to the aborigines. ”

“ The excitement and freedom of the fur trade appealed especially to the volatile, fun loving French; and music and badinage and laughter often filled the day.
After the Americans assumed control, in 1816, Congress forbade the British to conduct the fur trade in our country. This was to prevent them from influencing the Western Indians to war; but turning out the English traders served greatly to help the American Fur Company, founded by John Jacob Astor, and having its headquarters on the Island of Mackinac. ”

“ To secure these French goods, the Indians had but to hunt and bring the skins to the white men. The Indian who could secure a gun found it easier to get skins than before, and he also had a weapon which made him more powerful against his [82] enemies. It was not long before the Indian forgot how to make utensils and weapons for himself, and became very dependent on the white trader. This is why the fur trade was at the bottom of every event in the forest, and for full two hundred years was of supreme importance to all the people who lived in the Wisconsin woods. ”

“ They knew full well that the culprits were but carrying out the law of their race in seeking white scalps in vengeance for the Winnebagoes supposed to have been slain at Fort Snelling. Whistler knew that the Indians considered Red Bird and Wekau as heroes, and could feel no pangs of conscience, because treachery toward enemies was the customary method of Indian warfare. Realizing these facts, the American officers recognized that it required a fine type of heroism on the part of these simple natives thus to offer themselves up to probable death, to redeem their tribe from destruction. ”

“ When the missionaries were performing the rites of their church, baptizing children or sick people, or saying mass, it was thought by these simple barbarians that they were practicing magic for the destruction of the red men. Thus the Jesuits, during the hundred years or more which they spent in traveling far and near through the forests of New France, seeking new tribes to convert, while still laboring with those already known, were in a state of perpetual martyrdom for the cause of Christianity. ”

“ All trade in New France was in the control of a monopoly, which charged heavy fees for licenses, severely punished all the unlicensed traders who could be detected, and fixed its own prices for everything. French traders were obliged, therefore, to charge the Indians more for their goods than the English charged for theirs; and it was a continual and often bloody struggle to keep the Indians of the Northwest from having any trade with the English colonists from the Atlantic coast, who had with great labor crossed the Alleghany Mountains and were now swarming into the Ohio River valley. ”

“ If our posterity can inherit from those early French occupants of our soil their simple tastes, their warm hearts, their happy temperament, their social virtues, then the old French régime will have brought a blessing to Wisconsin, and not merely a halo of historical romance. ”

“ Great was the excitement in the United States, when, in 1853, it was confidently announced by a New York magazine writer that the long lost prince had at last been discovered, in the person of the middle-aged Eleazer Williams, an Episcopal missionary to the Oneida Indians at Little Kaukauna, in the lower valley of the Fox.
The Bonaparte family, represented by Louis Napoleon, were just then in control of France; but the Bourbon [197] family, of which Louis the XVII., were he alive, would naturally be the head, considered themselves rightful hereditary masters of that country. ”

“ During the Revolution, none of the forts in Wisconsin were occupied by British soldiers, and they were allowed to tumble into decay. Wisconsin was, however, used as a recruiting ground for Indian allies. Not only did Langlade and Gautier raise a war party of Wisconsin Indians to help Hamilton in his expedition against Vincennes, but they were frequently in Wisconsin on similar business during the war. In 1779 Gautier led a party of Wisconsin Indians to Peoria, in the Illinois country, where there was an old French fort which, it was thought, might fall into the hands of the Americans. ”

“ The Foxes, together with their Winnebago friends, had heard of the approach of the whites, and fled; but the white invaders burned every deserted village in the valley, and destroyed all the crops, leaving the red men to face the rigor of winter with neither huts nor food.
Fleeing from their native valley before the onset of the army, the unhappy fugitives, said to have been four thousand in number, descended the Wisconsin and ascended the Mississippi, to find their Sioux allies in the neighborhood of Lake Pepin. ”

“ In Kentucky there were several log forts, around each of which were grouped the rude cabins of frontiersmen, who were half farmers and half hunters, tall, stalwart fellows, as courageous as lions, and ever on the alert for the crouching Indian foe, who came when least expected. The country northwest of the Ohio River was then a part of the British province of Quebec. Here and there in this Old Northwest, as we now call it, were small villages of French and half-breed fur traders, each village protected by a little log fort ”

“ While not relaxing our endeavor to plant the world with progressive men who shall make the most of life, we should see to it that the savage races are pushed to the wall with as kindly and forbearing a hand as possible; that we apply to them humane methods, and give them credit for possessing the sentiments of men who, like us, dearly love their old homes, and are willing to fight for them. These sentiments have certainly not often been applied in the past, by our Anglo-Saxon race, to the Indians of North America. ”

“ Pioneers, in their stories of those early years, are fond of calling them the "good old times," and styling present folk and manners degenerate. No doubt there was a certain charm in the rude simplicity of frontier life, but there were, as well, great inconveniences and rude discomforts, with which few pioneers of our day would wish to be confronted, after having tasted the pleasures arising from the wealth of conveniences of every sort which distinguishes these latter days. ”

“ In 1857, as a result of the Glover affair, the Wisconsin legislature passed an act making it a duty of district attorneys in each county "to use all lawful means to protect, defend, and procure to be discharged ... every person arrested or claimed as a fugitive slave," and throwing around the poor fellow every possible safeguard. Such was Wisconsin's final protest against the iniquity of the Fugitive Slave Law.
Naturally, Booth had been looked upon by the United States marshal as the chief abettor of the riot. ”

“ The Americans, from their cold, businesslike conduct, impressed the Indians as being "stingy old women."
Nobody on the frontier, the following winter, seemed to pay the slightest attention to the terms of the treaty. The Sioux, who lived west of the Mississippi, the Winnebagoes in southern and western Wisconsin, and the Chippewas in the north, quarreled with one another and scalped one another as freely as ever; while French traders, in British employ, stirred up the red men, and told them that Great Britain would soon have the whole [128] country back again. ”

“ There being little legal machinery west of Lake Michigan, before Wisconsin Territory was erected, local government was slow to establish itself. Nothing but the good temper and stout common sense of the people prevented anarchy, under such a condition of affairs. For many years, the few public enterprises were undertaken at private expense. At Green Bay, schools were thus conducted, as early as 1817. In 1821 the citizens of that village raised a fund by popular subscription, and built a jail; and eleven years later, they asked the legislature of Michigan Territory to pay for it. ”

“ But we are living in an age of scientific investigation; scientific methods are being applied to every branch of study; history has had to be rewritten for us in the new light which is being thrown upon the path of human development. This is not the place to set forth in detail the steps by which knowledge has been slowly but surely reached, regarding the history of the once mysterious mounds. ”

“ The daring Nicolet pushed his way through the wilderness, a thousand miles west of the little French settlement at Quebec, solely to introduce the traffic in furs to our savages, and others were not long in following him. Soon it was learned that there were lead mines in what is now southwest Wisconsin.
It is not probable that the aborigines, before the coming of white men, made any other use of lead than from it to fashion a few rude ornaments. But the French at once recognized the great value of this mineral, in connection with the fur trade. ”

“ The Indians had learned with amazement that the British palefaces were going to surrender to the American palefaces, without showing fight, and simply because somewhere, far away in another part of the world, some other palefaces, whom these Englishmen had never even seen, had held a peace council and buried the hatchet. This sort of thing could not be understood by the savages encamped outside the walls of Fort McKay, save as an evidence of rank cowardice. They called the redcoats a lot of "old women," became insolent, and even threatened them. ”

“ The roaring flames, once started in such a season, are fanned by the winds which the heat generates, and, gathering strength, roll forward with resistless impetus; dense, resinous forest growths succumb before their assault, rivers are leaped by columns of fire, and everything goes down before the destroyer. ”

“ The Indian history of Wisconsin is the more interesting, because here these two great families or groups met, clashed, and intermingled. Despite the diversity of tongues, they were, with certain variations, much the same sort of people; and for our present purpose, the description of one tribe will serve for the description of all.
In size, Indians resemble Europeans; some are shorter than the average white man, some taller; the Kickapoos were among the short men. Indians have black eyes and coarse, black hair. ”