The Story of Tonty

BY

MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD

Illustrated

CHICAGO A. C. McCLURG AND COMPANY 1890 Copyright, By A. C. McClurg and Co. A.D. 1889.

INTRODUCTION.

No man can see all of a mountain at once. He sees its differing sides. Moreover, it has rainy and bright day aspects, and summer and winter faces.

The romancer is covered with the dust of old books, modern books, great books, and out of them all brings in a condensing hand these pictures of two men whose lives were as large as this continent.

La Salle is a definite figure in the popular mind. But La Salle’s greater friend is known only to historians and students. To me the finest fact in the Norman explorer’s career is the devotion he commanded in Henri de Tonty. No stupid dreamer, no ruffian at heart, no betrayer of friendship, no mere blundering woodsman—as La Salle has been outlined by his enemies—could have bound to himself a man like Tonty. The love of this friend and the words this friend has left on record thus honor La Salle. And we who like courage and steadfastness and gentle courtesy in men owe much honor which has never been paid to Henri de Tonty.

I. FRONTENAC.

Along the entire river front of Montreal camp-fires faded as the amphitheatre of night gradually dissolved around them.

Canoes lay beached in one long row as if a shoal of huge fish had come to land. The lodges made a new street along Montreal wharf. Oblong figures of Indian women moved from shadow to shine, and children stole out to caper beside kettles where they could see their breakfasts steaming. Here and there light fell upon a tranquil mummy less than a metre in length, standing propped against a lodge side, and blinking stoical eyes in its brown flat face as only a bark-encased Indian baby could blink; or it slept undisturbed by the noise of the awakening camp, looking a mummy indeed.

The savage of the New World carried his family with him on every peaceable journey; sometimes to starve for weeks when the winter hunting proved bad. It was only when he went to war that he denied himself all squaw service.

The annual beaver fair was usually held in midsummer, but this year the tribes of the upper lakes had not descended with their furs to Montreal until September. These precious skins, taken out of the canoes, were stored within the lodges.

Every male of the camp was already greasing, painting, and feathering himself for the grand council, which always preceded a beaver fair. Hurons, Ottawas, Crees, Nipissings, Ojibwas, Pottawatamies, each jealous for his tribe, completed a process begun the night before, and put on what might be called his court dress. In some cases this was no dress at all, except a suit of tattooing, or a fine coat of ochre streaked with white clay or soot. The juice of berries heightened nature in their faces. But there were grand barbarians who laid out robes of beaver skin, ample, and marked inside with strange figures or porcupine quill embroidery. The heads swarming in this vast and dusky dressing-room were some of them shaven bare except the scalp lock, some bristling in a ridge across the top, while others carried the natural coarse growth tightly braided down one side, with the opposite half flowing loose.

Montreal behind its palisades made a dim background to all this early illumination,—few domestic candles shining through windows or glancing about the Hôtel Dieu as the nuns began their morning devotions. Mount Royal now flickered a high shadow, and now massed inertly against stars; but the river, breathing forever like some colossal creature, reflected all the camp-fires in its moving scales.

The guns of the fort had fired a salute to Indian guests on their arrival the evening before. But at sunrise repeated cannonading, a prolonged roll of drums, and rounds of musketry announced that the governor-general’s fleet was in sight.

Montreal flocked to the wharf where already the savages were arrayed in solemn ranks. Marching out of the fortress with martial music, past the Hôtel Dieu to the landing-place where Frontenac must step from his boat, came the remnant of the Carignan regiment. Even the Sulpitian brotherhood, whose rights as seigniors of Montreal island this governor had at one time slighted, appeared to do him honor. And gentle nuns of St. Joseph were seen in the general outpour of inhabitants.

This governor-general, with all his faults, had a large and manly way of meeting colonial dangers, and was always a prop under the fainting heart of New France.

His boats made that display upon the St. Lawrence which it was his policy and inclination to make before Indians. Officers in white and gold, and young nobles of France, powdered, and flashing in the colors of Louis’ magnificent reign, crowded his own vessel,—young men who had ventured out to Quebec because it was the fashion at court to be skilled in colonial matters, and now followed Frontenac as far as Montreal to amuse themselves with the annual beaver fair. The flag of France, set with its lily-like symbol, waved over their heads its white reply to its twin signal on the fort.

Frontenac stood at the boat’s prow, his rich cloak thrown back, and his head bared to the morning river breath and the people’s shouts. Being colonial king pleased this soldier, tired of European camps and the full blaze of royalty, where his poverty put him to the disadvantage of a singed moth.

He came blandly gliding to the wharf, Louis de Buade, Count of Frontenac, and Baron of Palluau, and the only governor of New France who ever handled the arrogant Five Nations of the Iroquois like a strong father,[1]—a man who would champion the rights of his meanest colonist, and at the same time quarrel with his lieutenant in power to his last breath.

Merchants of Quebec followed him with boat-loads of Indian supplies. Even Acadia had sent men to this voyage, for the Baron de Saint-Castin appeared in the fleet, with his young Indian Baroness. It is told of Saint-Castin that he had kept a harem in his sylvan principality of Pentegoet; but being a man of conscience, he confessed and reformed. It is also told of him that he never kept a harem or otherwise lapsed into the barbarisms of the Penobscots, among whom he carried missionaries and over whom he was a great lord. Type of the Frenchman of his day, he came to New France a lad in the Carignan regiment, amassed fortunes in the fur trade, and holding his own important place in the colony, goaded like a thorn the rival colony of New England along his borders.

But most conspicuous to the eyes of Montreal were two men standing at Frontenac’s right hand, a Norman and an Italian. Both were tall, the Italian being of deeper colors and more generous materials. His large features were clothed in warm brown skin. Rings of black hair thick as a fleece were cut short above his military collar. His fearless, kindly eyes received impressions from every aspect of the New World. There dwelt in Henri de Tonty the power to make men love him at sight,—savages as well as Europeans. He wore the dress of a French lieutenant of infantry, and looked less than thirty years old, having entered the service of France in his early youth.

The other man, Robert Cavelier,—called La Salle from an estate he had once owned in France,—explorer, and seignior of Fort Frontenac and adjacent grants on the north shore of Lake Ontario, was at that time in the prime of his power. He was returning from France, with the king’s permission to work out all his gigantic enterprises, with funds for the purpose, and one of the most promising young military men in Europe as his lieutenant.

Montreal merchants on the wharf singled out La Salle with jealous eye, which saw in the drooping point and flaring base of his nose an endless smile of scorn. He was a man who had only to use his monopolies to become enormously rich, cutting off the trade of the lakes from Montreal. That he was above gain, except as he could use it for hewing his ambitious road into the wilderness, they did not believe. The merchants of Montreal readily translated the shyness and self-restraint of his solitary nature into the arrogance of a recently ennobled and successful man.

La Salle had a spare face, with long oval cheeks, curving well inward beside the round of his sensitive prominent chin. Gray and olive tones still further cooled the natural pallor of his skin and made ashen brown the hair which he wore flowing.

The plainness of an explorer and the elegance of a man exact in all his habits distinguished La Salle’s dress against that background of brilliant courtiers.

He moved ashore with Frontenac, who saluted benignly both the array of red allies and the inhabitants of this second town in the province.

The sub-governor stepped out to escort the governor-general to the fort, bells rang, cannon still boomed, martial music pierced the heart with its thrill, and the Carignan squad wheeled in behind Frontenac’s moving train.

“Sieur de la Salle! Sieur de la Salle!” a little girl called, breaking away from the Sisters of St. Joseph, whose convent robes had enclosed her like palisades, “take me also in the procession!”

This demand granted itself, so nimbly did she escape a nun’s ineffectual grasp and spring between Tonty and La Salle.

Frontenac himself had turned at the shrill outcry. He laughed when he saw the wilful young creature taking the explorer by the wrist and falling into step so close to his own person.

A pursuing nun, unwilling to interrupt the governors train, hovered along its progress, making anxious signs to her charge, until she received an assuring gesture from La Salle. She then went back dissatisfied but relieved of responsibility; and the child, with a proud fling of her person, marched on toward the fort.

II HAND-OF-IRON.

“Mademoiselle the tiger-cat,” said La Salle to Tonty, making himself heard with some effort above the din of martial sound.

The young soldier lifted his hat with his left hand and made the child a bow, which she regarded with critical eyes.

“I am the niece of Monsieur de la Salle,” she explained to Tonty as she marched; “so he calls me tiger-cat.”

“Mademoiselle Barbe Cavelier is the tiger-cat’s human name,” the explorer added, laughing. “It is flattering to have this nimble animal spring affectionately on one from ambush; but I should soon have inquired after you at the convent, mademoiselle.”

“I did not spring affectionately on you,” said Barbe; “I wanted to be in the procession.”

“Hast thou then lost all regard for thy uncle La Salle during his year of absence?”

Barbe’s high childish voice distinctly and sincerely stated, “No, monsieur; I have fought all the girls at the convent on your account. Jeanne le Ber said nothing against you; but she is a Le Ber. I am glad you came back in such grandeur. I was determined to be in the grandeur myself. But it is not a time to give you my cheek for a kiss.”

La Salle smiled over her head at Tonty. The Italian noted her marked resemblance to the explorer. She had the same features in delicate tints, the darkness of her eyelashes and curls only emphasizing the type. Already her small nose drooped at the point and flared at the base. As La Salle and his young kinswoman stepped together, Tonty gauged them alike,—two self-restraining natures with unmeasured endurance and individual force like the electric current.

Montreal’s square bastioned fort, by the mouth of a small creek flowing into the St. Lawrence, was soon reached from the wharf. It stood at the south end of the town.

“My dear child,” said La Salle, stating his case to Barbe, “it is necessary for me to go into the fort with Count Frontenac, and equally necessary you should go back at once to the Sisters. I will bring you out of the convent to-morrow to look at the beaver fair. This is Monsieur de Tonty, my lieutenant; let him take you back to the nuns. I shall be blamed if I carry you into the fort.”

Barbe heard him without raising objections. She looked at Tonty, who gave her his left hand and drew her out of the train.

It swept past them into the fortress gates,—gallant music, faces returning her eager gaze with smiles, plumes, powdered curls, and laces, gold and white uniforms, soldiers with the sun flashing from their gun-barrels.

Barbe watched the last man in. To express her satisfaction she then rose to the tip of one foot and hopped three steps. She was lightly and delicately made, and as full of restless grace as a bird. Her face and curls bloomed above and strongly contrasted with the raiment her convent guardians planned for a child dependent, not on their charity, but on their maternal care.

The September morning enveloped the world in a haze of brightness, like that perfecting blue breath which we call the bloom upon the grape. A great landscape with a scarf of melting azure resting around its horizon, or ravelling to shreds against the mountain’s breast, or pretending to be wood-smoke across the river, drew Tonty’s eye from the disappearing pageant.

That fair land was a fit spot whereon the most luxurious of civilizations should touch and affiliate with savages of the wilderness. Up the limpid green river the Lachine Rapids showed their teeth with audible roar. From that point Mount Royal could be seen rising out of mists and stretching its hind-quarters westward like some vast mastodon. But to Tonty only its front appeared, a globe dipped in autumn colors and wearing plumes of vapor. The sky of this new hemisphere rose in unmeasured heights which the eye followed in vain; there seemed no zenith to the swimming blinding azure.

A row of booths for merchants had been built all along the outside of Montreal’s palisades, and traders were thus early setting their goods in array.

At the north extremity of the town that huge stone windmill built by the seigniors for defence, cast a long dewy shadow toward the west. Its loopholes showed like dark specks on the body of masonry.

Sun-sparkles on the river were no more buoyant and changeable than the child at Tonty’s side. Dimples came and went in her cheeks. Her blood was stirred by the swarming life around her.

“Monsieur,” she confided to her uncle’s lieutenant, “I am meditating something very wicked.”

“Certainly that is impossible, mademoiselle,” said Tonty, accommodating his step to her reluctant gait.

“I am meditating on not going back to the convent.”

“Where would you go, mademoiselle?”

“Everywhere, to see things.”

“But my orders are to escort you to the nuns. You would disgrace me as a soldier.”

Barbe lifted her gaze to his face and was diverted from rebellion. Tonty put out his arm to guard her, but a tall stalking brave was pushed against her in passing and immediately startled by the thud of her prompt fist upon his back. The Indian turned, unsheathing his knife.

“Get out of my way, thou ugly big warrior,” said Barbe, meeting his eye, which softened from fierceness to laughter, and holding her fist ready for further encounter.

The Indian made some mocking gestures and menaced her playfully with his thumb. Tonty threw his arm across her shoulder and moved her on toward the convent. Barbe escaped from this touch, an entirely new matter filling her mind.

“Monsieur, even old Jonaneaux in our Hôtel Dieu hath not such a heavy hand as thou hast. Many a time hath he pulled me down off the palisade when I looked over to see the coureurs de bois go roaring by. But thou hast a hand like iron!”

Tonty flushed, being not yet hardened to his misfortune.

“It is a hand of iron. I am called Main-de-fer.”[2]

Barbe took hold of it in its glove. Of all the people she had ever met Tonty was the only person whose touch she did not resent.

“The other hand is not like unto it, monsieur?”

He gave her the other also, and she compared their weight. With a roguish lifting of her nostrils she inquired,—

“Will every bit of you turn to metal like this heavy hand?”

“Alas, no, mademoiselle; there is no hope of that.”

Tonty stripped his gauntlet off. With half afraid fingers she examined the artificial member. It was of copper.

“Where is the old one, monsieur?”

“It was blown off by a grenade at Messina last year.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Not now. Except when I think of the service of Monsieur de la Salle, and of my being thus pieced out as a man.”

Barbe measured his height and breadth and warm-toned face with satisfied eyes. She consoled him.

“There is so much of you, monsieur, you can easily do without a hand.”

III. FATHER HENNEPIN.

“Thou art a comfort to a soldier, mademoiselle,” said Tonty, heartily.

“But not to a priest,” observed Barbe. “For last birthday when I was eleven my uncle Abbé stuck out his lip and said I was eleven years bad. But my uncle La Salle kissed my cheek. There goeth François le Moyne.” Her face became suddenly distorted with grimaces of derision beside which Tonty could scarcely keep his gravity. A boy of about her own age ran past, dropping her a sneer for her pains.

“Monsieur, these Le Moynes and Sorels and Bouchers and Varennes and Joliets and Le Bers, they are all against my uncle La Salle. The girls talk about it in the convent. But he hath the governor on his side, so what can they do? I have pinched Jeanne le Ber at school, but she will never pinch back and it only makes her feel holier. So I pinch her no more. Do you know Jeanne le Ber?”

“No,” said Tonty, “I have not that pleasure.”

“Oh, monsieur, it is no pleasure. She says so many prayers. When I have prayers for penances they make me so tired I have to get up and hop between them. But Jeanne le Ber would pray all the time if her father did not pull her off her knees. My father and mother died in France. If they were alive they would not have to pull me off my knees.”

“But a woman should learn to pray, even as a man should learn to fight,” observed Tonty. “He stands between her and danger, and she should stand linking him to heaven.”

“I can fight for myself,” said Barbe. “And everybody ought to say his own prayers; but it makes one disagreeable to say more than his share. I wish to grow up an agreeable person.”

They had reached the palisade entrance which fronted the river, Barbe’s feet still lagging amid the lively scenes outside. She allowed Tonty to lead her with his left hand, thus sheltering her next the booths from streams of passing Indians and traders.

Beside this open gate she would have lingered indefinitely, chattering to a guardian who felt her hatred of convent restraint, and gazing at preparations for the council: at prunes and chopped pieces of oxen being put to boil for an Indian feast; at the governor’s chair from the fortress, where the sub-governor lived, borne by men to the middle of that space yearly occupied as the council ring. But a watchful Sister was hovering ready inside the palisade gate, and reaching forth her arm she drew her charge away from Tonty, giving him brief and scandalized thanks for his service.

Barbe looked back. It was worth Tonty’s while to catch sight of that regretful face smeared about its warm neck by curls, its lips parted to repeat and still repeat, “Adieu, monsieur. Adieu, monsieur.”

But two men had come between the disappearing child and him, one man, dressed partly like an officer and partly like a coureur de bois, throwing both arms around Tonty in the eager Latin manner.

“My cousin Henri de Tonty, welcome to the New World. I waited with my gouty leg at the fortress for you; but when you came not, like a good woodsman, I tracked you down.”

“My cousin Greysolon du Lhut! Glad am I to find you so speedily. This cold and heavy hand belies me.”