Chapter XII

THE CHAMPIONSHIP FOR THE AMERICAN BELT.
1754 TO 1763.

No Hopes for the Millennium in American Colonies up to 1754.—More Swords
than Ploughshares.—Mars in America.—Sixteen Indian Wars in 147
Years.—How they were fed by French Oil and blown by French
Bellows.—The Five Great Continental Wars, and how they reached over
and handled the Colonies.—The Treaty Patches, and how they failed to
cover the War Breaches.—The Volcanic Character of American Soil.—How
the Animosities of France and England grew through Four Centuries, and
in what a Hateful Harvest they waved, in 1754, each Side the
Sea.—Celebrated Fights between the Rivals in Europe.—How Commercial
Competition rubbed in Salt Water, and Religious Differences Brimstone,
into the Wounds.—Memorable Cases of Battle Surgery.—The Relative
Merits of English and French Claims to America fully stated.—Deeds of
Land and of Arms clash.—French Jesuits with Crosses and Traders with
Skins encompass the English Plantations from Maine to Minnesota, and
thence to Alabama and Texas.—Marquette, Joliet, La Salle, Lallemand
and others.—The Former escaped the Fast Life of Chicago, and La Salle
the Hazards of Natchez.—France seeks to fasten a Remarkable Rosary
around the Neck of Young America; England to cut it.—Suitors to the
same Maiden, they suited not her nor each other.—Their soft Ways to
her.—Their Hardness to each other.—Their Long Quarrels over her Person
and Purse result at last in a Decisive Fight.—The Championship for the
American Belt.—The Champions, the Belt, and the Ring described.—How
John Bull and Jean Crapeau stepped into the Latter.—The Nine Rounds
from 1754 to 1763.—How Mr. Bull won; what he said, and how Monsieur
Crapeau behaved.—A Suitor pleased, and a Suitor non-suited.

The American colonists up to 1754 could not well entertain, from their own experience, any well-founded hopes of the speedy advent of the millennium, when meek-eyed Peace is to hold the good reapers—McCormicks or others—beaten out from ugly swords, and when war is to be banished somewhere, probably to that red-faced Mars, whose vulgar manners, bricky hair, and swaggering gait have not unfrequently brought him into disgrace with his neighbors, particularly with the touchy Venus, and sometimes put him into an eclipse with that steady-going old tramper, the Earth. But somehow, in spite of his disreputable antecedents, Mars had contrived to acquire a very strong influence over that part of our planet occupied by the thirteen Colonies, from the time of the very first settlement at Jamestown, in 1607, throughout all the century and a half which followed. Over that tract of time, their march along the highway of life was like an Irish landlord’s visit to his own estate,—armed, grim, and hostilely interrogative of all who approached. Like his, their advance, too, was

“Per ignes
Suppositos cineri doloso.”

During the one hundred and forty-seven years of which we speak, sixteen distinct wars with various Indian tribes or confederacies, averaging one every nine years, had been carried on at various points, from the extreme northeast to the farthest southern border. In these wars, formal expeditions were organized, bodies of troops, large for the populations, raised, equipped, and sent out amid the sighs of young ladies and the fears of their mothers, punishing old massacres, and wasting, like prairie fires, whole districts, and of course kindling other Indian resentments that swept back over the settlements.

Over nearly all of these combustible war piles it was found that French oil was poured to make the fire take readily, and French bellows were at work to blow the savage flames into a disastrous conflagration. Between these more formidable expeditions were interjected petty skirmishes, midnight attacks, sorties, and reprisals, as numerous and as little regarded by the colonists in general as railroad killings or corporation massacres with us. Guns and swords were as common in farmers’ houses, as spades and hoes to-day. Arrows to the right, left, and in front of them, pointed many colonial morals, and adorned many a sad tale of border life. Bloody Brooks were christened with red water in three different settlements; and poor, indeed, are the annals of that town—whose records reach back beyond the half-way mile-stone of the eighteenth century—that cannot show the garnishments of the bow and arrow. Few, indeed, were the families of New England that could keep the Passover, commemorative of exemptions from the terrible visitations of the Indian smiter.

Besides these chronic and almost ceaseless domestic troubles, the great continental wars—those of 1651 and 1664 between England and Holland, in 1656 between England and Spain, King William’s war from 1688 to 1697, Queen Anne’s from 1702 to 1713, and that free European fight for the Austrian succession which closed the half-century, covering in all twenty-nine years on this side the sea—drew between their mailed hands the tender Colonies, wrenched their young and growing interests from them, and hurled their protectors sometimes against the French of Acadia and New France, sometimes against the ever-hostile Indian tribes. The patched-up peaces which followed these great wars, and which covered the European breaches, left the colonial combatants battered and bruised, ragged in clothes, in debt for expenses, and in mourning for the lost, with Frenchmen and Indians irritated by the conflict, and goaded into hot revenges, which even the snows of New France could not cool.

In a word, the entire belt of land northwards and westward of the plantations was highly volcanic, some peak almost continually in eruption, while always throughout its whole extent mutterings under the cindered heat threatened wide-shaking action and crimsoned tidal waves.

The animosity between the French and English races in Europe, in 1754, almost surpasses our belief. For four centuries, from the days of Edward I. and the black-mailed Prince, who, with their armies, overran France, almost as numerously, and wrought as violently on her pride and taste as the irruptions of green-backed Americans to-day, French and English armies in the field, navies on the sea, wit, caricature, heavy-folioed bombs, light artillery, pasquinades, and exploding mines of sarcasm and raillery, not only mounded new graves on either side the Channel, and gashed ever-reminding physical wounds, but fretted and frayed Saxon self-complacency and Gallic egotism. Cressy, in 1346; Agincourt, in 1415; the battle of the Spurs, in 1513; the war in aid of the Huguenots, in 1627; Blenheim and Malplaquet, in 1706 and 1709,—planted bitter memories that waved continually in vigorous harvests of rancorous hatred. Jealous rivals stood by to remind each of her supposed disgraces, and thus to profit by new quarrels. Commercial competition rubbed salt water into the raw places. Differences of religious faith chafed them with brimstone. Squibs, tossed backwards and forwards, lit on inflamed parts, and raised national sores. Spanish-fly several times drew angry blisters, and proud flesh often set in around the edges. Plasters were of course put on by diplomatic surgeons; but the trouble was deeper than their patches could reach. The knife and steel scissors were then brought in again, and the national vivisections began anew. These surgical operations were almost constantly going on, and their description in Hume, Robertson, and other historians, might be appropriately called Memoirs of Celebrated Cases in Surgery.

It must be remembered that, at the period to which we are drawing the reader’s attention, railroads and swift steamers had not yet ironed out the stiff mastiff-like ruffles around the necks of these high-spirited, full-blooded nations. International expositions had not spread their cloths over the Field of Gold, on which rapiers should only be used to cut English roast beef and French pudding, and helmets be turned up into drinking-cups, to quaff, in cool Bordeaux, toasts to the _entente cordial_ of solid peace. On the contrary, at the middle of the eighteenth century the mutual hatred of the two nations saturated everything. National drinks, popular on one side of the twenty-mile strait which parted the imbibers, were poisons on the other. Clothes, worn by one race, were not only shunned, but caricatured with pen and pencil by the other. The paintings, the plastic arts, the literature, and legislation of the period have preserved in enduring forms the widely felt antipathy. Their mutual rancor dissolved the obligations of courtesy, dripped through diplomatic despatches, and left the green mould of jealousy on all the relations of the two governments, and even the business transactions of their people.

This envenomed home feeling had early crossed the Atlantic, and lost none of its acridity on the passage. In point of time the English were before the French in their American discoveries, but in settlement the French preceded the English. While the Cabots, the first Englishmen who ran down our country, touching in 1498 at Newfoundland, and thence coasting along our shores as far as Florida, without leaving any colonists behind them, anticipated Verizzanni, the first French discoverer in America, by twenty-five years, the French under Cartier in 1534, Roberval in 1542, and Ribault in 1562, landed and made fugitive settlements at various points, from the Huguenot plantation in South Carolina northwards around the present Provinces of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, and up the St. Lawrence as far westward as Montreal. Over this entire broad strip they had affixed the label “New France.” The English made no further discoveries of, nor any settlements in, America, after Cabot’s expedition, until 1583, when Sir Humphrey Gilbert, freighted with a charter from Queen Elizabeth, sailed for Virginia with a company of settlers. This was rapidly followed up, with little permanent result, however, by Raleigh, Granville, and Gosnold. The French settlement of Port Royal, on the Bay of Fundy, antedated that of the English at Jamestown five years.

England and France now vied with each other in granting large deeds of American territory, most of which conflicted with each other, as their martial deeds had done at home. The English Henry VII. granted to Mr. John Cabot all the lands which he might discover, reserving to his royal self a small commission of twenty per cent. Five years later the French Henry IV., without employing any lawyer to search the title, gave to De Monts so much of the same North American lot as now embraces Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, the New England States, and the confederated Dominion of Canada. Other unwarrantable warranty deeds were subsequently made and done by the rival grantors, involving the titles in distressing doubt and confusion. Military actions of ejectment followed. As early as 1629, Champlain and his French colony were driven from Quebec, like squatters on the property of another, and the French would then have been all ejected from New France but for an unwise and ignorant settlement between the two large European landlords, called the Treaty of 1630. Subsequently the French were dispossessed, as we have elsewhere recorded, of patches of the large estate given to De Monts,—Nova Scotia in 1710, and Cape Breton in 1745,—mere strips, it is true, compared with that broad-sweeping tract around which they had carried chain and compass, and planted the boundary stakes of stockades and forts, but which touched their national pride at its very heart centre.

JOLIET AND MARQUETTE DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI.
(p. 216)
]

The French growth in America was as steady as it was early in starting. Five years before the Pilgrim fathers and mothers landed at Plymouth, French missionaries had erected bark chapels in Maine, and consigned by devout rites the Pine State to the Virgin’s protection. While the Calvinists of Massachusetts Bay, the Plymouth Colony, and Connecticut were sturdily settling, by wordy argument, the grounds of their religious belief, Fathers Brebeuf, Lallemand, and other Gallic Jesuits were steadily and stealthily acquiring new grounds for the Pope and the French king. Barefooted emissaries, in serge, and girded, like the Baptist in the Judæan wilderness, with girdles about their loins, patiently and slowly travelling twelve hundred miles westward, foot-weary yet sustained by spiritual zeal, skirted those inland seas, Lakes Ontario, Erie, Huron, and Michigan, crossed the head-waters of the Hudson, the Ohio, and Wisconsin, hauled their birch canoes over regions now boiling with oil-wells, hissing with steam-driven factories, or lit up by the passing splendors of palace rail-cars, and had thus, as early as 1650, planted the Roman cross and the French lily side by side, as far west as Fond du Lac, and the cool head-fountains of Lake Superior. Fur-traders followed the Jesuit missionaries. These sought to clothe the Indians with a warm belief in the teachings of the Society of Jesus, and in the supremacy of his Catholic Majesty of France; those hastened after to unclothe the otter, the beaver, and other living fur-dealers of the small packs which they carried on their own backs, and to obtain possession of those which their fellows had yielded up to the sharp persuasions of the cinnamon-stained hunters and trappers. Religious zeal, inflaming French blood, and glowing through a patriotic national emulation with the English settlements along the Atlantic slope, within the next twenty-five years, launched canoes upon and traversed the great lakes pushed down the principal rivers running southward from Quebec to St. Paul, gathered proselytes by preaching, and skins by trading, and encompassing the needs, instincts, and revenges of the various Indian tribes scattered through this vast region,—excepting always the Five Nations, which uniformly adhered to the English,—established a cordon of French alliances and influences, which in time of peace stretched its protecting line between them and their English rivals, and in war vibrated to their touch, and twanged quivers full of arrows on their hereditary foes. These unwearying teachers and traders were now to take possession, in the name of France and Rome, of the valley of the Mississippi, and to scatter the seeds of Gallic civilization all down its prolific breadth, and over its wide deltas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. In 1673, the Jesuit, James Marquette, having previously penetrated from Quebec through the intervening wilderness to Sault St. Marie, and there established the first white settlement in the present State of Michigan, set out, with Joliet and two tawny interpreters, to trace the mysteries of the Great River of America. Sailing down the Wisconsin River, and reaching in a few days that wide-rolling flood which we now call the Mississippi River, and floating on its rough but kindly bosom for one hundred and eighty miles, they landed on its western bank, and, crossing a narrow portage, struck, without hurting, the Des Moines River. They were the first white men in Iowa, and next to De Soto, one hundred and thirty-one years before them, the only pale children that had ever looked into the wrinkled face of the Father of Waters. Here they were met by four red men, who, in answer to their inquiries, loftily proclaimed themselves to be “Illinois” or “Men.” The spirit of Chicago, thus filtrated, antedated its own settlement over one hundred and fifty years. Re-embarking, these Gallic adventurers swept on down the rapidly rushing river unsnagged; passed in safety the large open mouth of the Missouri; overlooked the future site of St. Louis; refused to listen to the temptation which beckoned them to ascend the Ohio to the future metropolis of bacon; floated along over the rusting armor of De Soto, without diving for it, keeping a good lookout on the dangerous territory of Arkansas on their right, and Mississippi on their left, until they at last reached the point where the Arkansas River hastens to throw its burden of earth and water upon the back of the giant stream. Here they found Indians with European weapons of steel; and they returned back, retracing their courageous steps homeward. Marquette, let us add, preached for two years to the wild men in and around the future Chicago, and finally died upon the borders of a little stream in Michigan, which gratefully perpetuates his name in its own.

Brave Marquette! He escaped the perils of Chicago to yield up his spirit amid the innocencies of Michigan.

In 1682 La Salle, the French fur-trader, ventured down the Mississippi to the Gulf, without stopping to take the bluff outposts that sentinelled the future Vicksburg, and without halting over night at Natchez, and encountering the loss of all his earnings in that hazardous, porous, and absorbing place. Two years later he formed one of a colony sent out from Rochelle, in France, by the minister Colbert, and was wrecked in the Bay of Metagorda, the first of that large series of castaways in that peculiarly enterprising empire called Texas.

France thus added the lone star to her American constellation.

Although the entire French population in America, in 1688, was, by their own count, only eleven thousand two hundred and forty-nine, against more than ten times that number of English-speaking colonists, they had ere the close of that century erected mission-houses and trading-posts from the mouth of the Kennebec, in Maine, westward and northward to the Falls of Minnehaha, and southward down the Mississippi, through Louisiana, Texas, and Southern Mississippi. French forts and stockades showed defiant guns at Niagara, Crown Point, Detroit, St. Louis, and along the mud-bearing delta of the river, that La Salle had, first of white men, overcome with a birch canoe.

Eastward the adventurous French next advanced along the sinuous shores of the Gulf. In 1702, on the western bank of the Mobile River, and upon the thirsty sand-plain which comes down to drink its waters, Mobile was founded by Bienville. Two years following, an invoice of twenty young French girls was sent out to help the census-taker. The lot suiting well, a second consignment of twenty-three was despatched the next year. These vivacious goods, however, it may be incidentally remarked, rose the following year, in price and self-estimation, and formed what is called “The Petticoat Insurrection,” a rebellion against the limited amount of Indian corn served out during a season of scarcity. But more corn coming out they acknowledged it, and went down in pleased submission and quiet.

THE “PETTICOAT INSURRECTION” IN MOBILE IN 1706.
(p. 221)
]

Lively Frenchmen now multiplied along the yeasty Gulf. In 1718 Bienville, then the French governor of Louisiana, courageously braving the alligators and swamp snakes, whose crescent attitude might have terrified a son of St. Patrick, began the city of New Orleans, of which, four years afterwards, Charlevoix, the historian and traveller, who visited it, gives this description: “The place has a population of about two hundred. I find it to consist of one hundred cabins disposed with little regularity; a large wooden warehouse; two or three dwellings that would be no ornament to a French village, and the half of a sorry storehouse, which they were pleased to lend to the Lord, but of which he had scarcely taken possession when it was proposed to turn him out to lodge in a tent.” These kind of loans, some maliciously aver, have continued fashionable in the Crescent City from that time to the present. However that may be, certain it is that the French settlements in America—a succinct narrative of which we had purposely deferred to give in connection with their last desperate struggle for power—had at the close of King George’s war, in 1748, reached their greatest extension. Imperial, too, was their stretch. Beginning at St. John’s, New Brunswick, and dotting the wide area that fills seventeen hundred miles between that point and the Mississippi River, at the present spunky little city of St. Paul, and stretching down that river fourteen hundred miles to its outlet, and so spreading westward into Texas, and eastward through Mississippi and Alabama, until they confronted the old Spanish plantation in Florida, these settlements zoned on three sides with a spiked belt the thirteen English Colonies on the Atlantic.

Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the accumulations of hatred through the preceding four had gathered to a festering head the hostile memories of the French race of English assumption, victories, and national contempt; and so through all this wide circuit of settlement, under cassock and surplice, under the coat of the soldier and the bear-skin of the trader, beat zealous French hearts, ready to assert the claims of a king deemed by them rightfully in possession, and to earn the absolution of a spiritual sovereign at Rome, ready, since the schism of Henry VIII., to be given to any one who would despoil or destroy the heretic English.

Young America, now at the budding period of her sweet sixteen, was, with her personal charms, her ample landed dower, and her ampler future expectations, a damsel well worth the keenest and best efforts of the two European rivals. France, besides being fired with the desire of getting possession of the large commissions likely to accrue from the handling her handsome estate, was anxious to make her Roman Catholic. For one hundred years she had been endeavoring to persuade the young girl to take from herself and place around her fair neck a rosary, among whose beads, at regular intervals, were interspersed some larger than the others wrought into shapes of cannon, swivels, little forts, and stockades.

England, ever looking after rich wards in chancery, with solid, landed cares, requiring a guardian, had as assiduously sought to gain the custody, and even to win the hand of the fresh and rosy American. She had not failed to observe the long and carefully made rosary, and had sought several times angrily to tear it off her neck with a glaived hand, and had more than once instigated the Iroquois to cut the shining chain at Lakes Champlain and Erie and on the Monongahela, and to scatter the metallic beads. She had also sent emissaries from the seaboard westward, bearing Protestant school-houses and churches, mission-houses, traders’ articles, and Saxon notions, to barter and exchange for the coveted rosary.

Each of the suitors, it was evident, was more intent upon the maiden’s fortune than her affections, more concerned about her lots than her lot. It was also abundantly manifest that the long-standing feuds and contentions over her possession and custody must at last and forever be decided.

The fight for the championship for the belt of America could no longer be postponed.

John Bull, bluff, beef-fed, plucky, and long-winded, weighing forty stone, stepped into the ring, tossed his tarpaulin to the centre, and having tipped off a bottle of Bass’s double XX, challenged Johnny Crapeau to fight it out for the lass. The Frenchman stripped at once for the fight, and with a nimble courtesy, thinly concealing his disdain, glided within the ropes which now surrounded the champions of Europe. Into the middle of the ring the belt was thrown. It was embroidered with Indian bead-work at one end and with beautifully wrought and valuable cotton fringes at the other, while picturesque figures of forest, lake, and plain set off the centre, and precious jewels and costly stones glittered all along either edge.

For nine years that great and deadly boxing-match lasted.

Why should we dwell upon it in detail? The world’s reporters were there, and have given full and accurate accounts, which have been read everywhere, except in France, with animated interest.

Most briefly, however, we may summarize the contest.

At the first call, each competitor came promptly forward, each eying the other warily, but with ill-suppressed dislike and jealousy. Some feints followed. A few passes were cautiously made, as if each was measuring his adversary and feeling for his strong and weak points. At length a rapid and dexterous touch of Mr. Bull’s stomach sent him uneasily back to his corner. Time was called for the second round in 1755, and, leaping forward, the alert Gaul struck his heavy, blundering antagonist in a weak spot in front, called Fort du Quesne, from which he reeled back to his place, and was held up for a time in a fainting condition by one George Washington, a young man of twenty-two, then a friend of Mr. Bull, and invited to be present. Recovering after a little time, Mr. Bull suddenly sprang up in intense suffering and mortification, and made across the ring in fury; but scarcely had he got within reach of the Frenchman, when he received a stunning blow on his very Crown Point. Time being up, the stout Briton again advanced towards his adversary with a most menacing manner, and struck out full from the shoulder, as if he intended to leave an awkward scar in the face, but missing his footing, he fell forward in a pool of water, named Ontario, the angry Gaul rolling over him, and punishing him when down in a manner deemed almost foul by the spectators. On the fourth round, in 1757, the Saxon pugilist rushed confidently forward, and aimed a direct thrust at a very ugly pimple on the Frenchman’s face, called Louisburg; but the Celt skilfully parried the home thrust, and, while his adversary was gathering himself to a second onset, delivered a regular Montcalm settler at Ticonderoga, a very tender British point, which drew blood in profusion.

Thus far the heavy Englishman had been worsted in every encounter; but on the next round he advanced from his wintry corner with great caution, set his teeth together firmly, and, making a feint, struck his antagonist, ere he had recovered, two quick, telling blows, one on his face, completely crushing that ugly pimple, and the other on that spot in the chest still sore, Fort du Quesne; but while the Englishman was all too intent upon these, his antagonist got in another Montcalm settler on that English mouth, Lake Champlain, which brought out blood and water quite distressing for innocent spectators to witness.

Both parties now retired to their corners, the Frenchman pretty well exhausted, Mr. Bull just getting warmed up to the fight, and both, if possible, more infuriated than ever. Each was thoroughly sponged, and on time being called for the sixth round, in 1759, John Bull strode completely across the ring to the spot which his adversary had chosen, glaring like a very Wolfe. He had tasted blood, his own was up, and his leonine nature was roused for a crushing spring. Quickly and rapidly he planted a blow between the Gaul’s blue eyes, breaking the bridge of his nose at Point Levi. To evade this blow, the Gaul leaped back and attempted to parry it, and at the same time to inflict upon his enemy another Montcalm settler; but quick as thought Mr. Bull, heavy as he was, sprang upon a small mound called the Plains of Abraham, and there, swinging his sinewy arm high in the air, brought down his ponderous fist full upon the Frenchman’s head. Staggering backwards to the ropes, the Celt fell headlong, bloody and cruelly hurt.

THE CHAMPIONSHIP FOR THE AMERICAN BELT.
(p. 227)
]

To the on-lookers it was manifest that the hot contest was virtually decided; but a resentment that pulsed through every vein urged the Frenchman to a few more unsuccessful efforts. Coming up slowly to the summons in the three last rounds, in 1760, 1761, and 1762, just making time and saving himself from the confession of defeat, he sank down at the end of the ninth round, spent in spirits and strength, but vexed and angry with his adverse fortune. A herald, advancing in the centre of the ring, proclaimed that Johnny Crapeau withdrew his claim to the belt, only stipulating, in consideration of the past, that he might keep a bit of the fringe off its western end.

John Bull, picking up the coveted prize, announced in a bluff, resolute voice to the by-standers that the young lady, with the belt, dower, and expectations, all now passed to him forever.

Future chapters will show how little he knew of the maiden whom he claimed to have won.

Meanwhile Jean Crapeau signed and delivered to his English victor a release of all his claims to the damsel’s lands lying east of the Mississippi.