TONTY’S HEROIC VENTURE

Couture had added the fatal sequel to the story of the AbbÉ and Joutel. Tonty heard it with mingled despair and rage. He thought of La Salle lying dead and unburied among the weeds beside a river hundreds of leagues in the wilderness; and he thought of the five men who had come to his fort and withheld the truth from him, the trusted lieutenant of their master. So La Salle was in good health when he parted from them on the other side of the Cenis villages! He remembered now the strange silence of Father Douay. The friar could not say that La Salle was well when he left him.

But the anger of Tonty rose most strongly against that priestly brother—the AbbÉ who had prevented Joutel from taking vengeance upon the murderers, who had accepted Tonty’s hospitality all through the winter while deceiving him, and who had run off with his secret to France after begging supplies under a letter from his dead brother.

But what of the little garrison on the shore of the Gulf, the forlorn fragment of the colony under Gabriel Barbier at the other Fort St. Louis? Tonty thought of Father MembrÉ and of the hardships they had gone through together. Was it too late to save them? A year had gone by since the AbbÉ and his party had reached the fort on the Illinois. It was almost two years since they had left Barbier; yet the colony might still be alive. The master was gone and there was no one left to save them but himself.

Perhaps in making ready to lead a rescue party to the fort on the Gulf, Tonty forgot some of his anger atthe AbbÉ. Moreover, the Indian tribes between the Illinois and the sea had given the AbbÉ assurances that they would rally to an attack upon the Spaniards of the Southwest. Possibly he could do more than save the colony: it might be that he could fulfill the long cherished hope of La Salle by gathering a force of French and Indians and invading the territory of the hated Spaniards.

Twice Tonty had gone to the Gulf—once with La Salle and once in search of him. Now all that remained for him to do was to rescue the survivors whom La Salle’s death had left almost without hope. He sent Couture back on the trail by which the AbbÉ and his party had come, to get what information he could; but Couture’s canoe was wrecked a hundred leagues from the fort and he returned without news.

Then Tonty bought an Indian dugout and taking with him four or five Frenchmen, a Shawnee, and two Indian slaves, was on his way early in December. On the 17th, a village of Illinois Indians at the mouth of the river saw him go by; and a month later, near the mouth of the Arkansas, the Kappa tribe welcomed him with great joy and danced the calumet before him. He could not stop long at the Arkansas towns, but pushed on down the river to the country of the Taensas and the Natchez.

With a band of Taensas he left the Mississippi and struck off toward the west. After traveling some days across country they came upon the village of the Nachitoches, where they distributed presents and concluded peace with the Indians. Taking guides at this point they went up the Red River till they reached the village of the Cadadoquis, which lay upon the route by which the AbbÉ and Joutel and their companions had struggled out of the wilderness. Here the Indians told Tonty that Hiens and his party were farther on at a village known as Nabedache. These Nabedaches were the same Indians whom Joutel and the AbbÉ called the Cenis. At last Tonty was nearing the object of his expedition; a few more days and he would join the fragment of the party of La Salle and push on to the Gulf.

But what was this murmuring? The Frenchmen flatly refused to go farther; only one of them would stay with their leader. Tonty would push on nevertheless. With his one white man, the Shawnee, the two slaves, and five Cadadoquis as guides, he took up his march again early in April. The Frenchman strayed from the party and it was two long days before he found them again. Meanwhile, in crossing a river he had lost most of their powder—a serious misfortune.

Before the end of the month Tonty and his party reached the Nabedache village where two years before the AbbÉ and his companions had left Hiens and his crew among the Indians. The Indians told various stories of the Frenchmen for whom Tonty was searching. Some said that Hiens and his party had gone off with their chiefs to fight the Spaniards; while others told him that three had been killed by another tribe and the rest had gone away in search of arrowheads. Tonty himself came to the firm conclusion that the Cenis had killed the survivors.

He was now many leagues beyond the Red River and within a few days’ journey of the scene of La Salle’s murder. Eighty leagues more would take him to the fort on the Bay of St. Louis. Tonty begged for guides, but the Cenis would give him none. Hiens and his men were not to be found. He looked at his remaining supply of gunpowder, so necessary for providing food as well as defense. It was almost gone. Even Tonty could go no farther. With heavy heart he gave the Indians some hatchets and glass beads in exchange for Spanish horses and turned back toward the Mississippi.

It was the 10th of May when they reached the Cadadoquis village on the Red River, and here they stopped for a week to rest their horses. Then with an Indian guide they started once more for the Coroa village. In all the ten years Tonty had spent in the wilds he never had suffered such hardships—not even during his bitter experiences in the winter of 1680, when with Father MembrÉ and his young French companions he had struggled out of the clutches of the Iroquois in the valley of the Illinois and fought his way against cold and starvation to the friendly Pottawattomie village on Green Bay.

While leading one of the horses by the bridle across a swamp the guide imagined himself pursued by an alligator and tried to climb a tree. In his haste he entangled the bridle of Tonty’s horse, which was drowned. Fearful of punishment the guide made off to his people, leaving the party to find their way alone.

With Tonty in the lead they crossed, by one means or another, eight or ten swollen streams. Everywhere the country seemed drowned, for the spring freshets were on. They gave up their horses and carried their own baggage, wading day after day in water often up to their knees. They had to sleep and light their fires and cook their food on the trunks of fallen trees placed together. Only once did they find anything like dry land in the endless leagues of flooded country.

Their food gave out and they ate their dogs. There was nothing left and no wild animals were to be found in all the wet dreariness. One, two, three days passed with nothing to eat—only the water everywhere. On the evening of the third day, the 14th of July, they came at length to the Coroa village, where the chiefs feasted them for as many days as they had fasted. Here they found two of the men who had deserted; and toward the end of the month they all went on together to the towns at the mouth of the Arkansas River. The months of hardship had sapped even Tonty’s endurance, and now for nearly two weeks he lay sick with a fever among these kindly Indians.

It was late in September, 1689, when Tonty finally reached the towering rock at Fort St. Louis and climbed to its friendly summit to rest. In the weary ten months’ expedition he had neither found the bones of his friend, nor reached his fort on the Gulf, nor led an invading force into the land of the Spaniard. But he had done all that lay in his power to rescue his leader’s last garrison.

The AbbÉ had left his own brother unburied in the wilds, had deliberately for more than a year delayed any effort to rescue the survivors at the fort, and had gone off to France on funds obtained by fraud and deceit. But Tonty, almost alone, had braved every peril and hardship for nearly a year in a last courageous but unsuccessful effort to save the pitiful remnant of his friend’s ill-fated colony on the Bay of St. Louis.