The Old Northwest | Page 4

the priest, the trader, and the
soldier; and with scarcely an exception these sites are as important
today as when they were first selected. Four regions, chiefly, were still
occupied by the French at the time of the capitulation of Montreal. The
most important, as well as the most distant, of these regions was on the
east bank of the Mississippi, opposite and below the present city of St.
Louis, where a cluster of missions, forts, and trading-posts held the
center of the tenuous line extending from Canada to Louisiana. A
second was the Illinois country, centering about the citadel of St. Louis
which La Salle had erected in 1682 on the summit of "Starved Rock,"
near the modern town of Ottawa in Illinois. A third was the valley of
the Wabash, where in the early years of the eighteenth century
Vincennes had become the seat of a colony commanding both the
Wabash and the lower Ohio. And the fourth was the western end of
Lake Erie, where Detroit, founded by the doughty Cadillac in 1701, had
assumed such strength that for fifty years it had discouraged the
ambitions of the English to make the Northwest theirs.
Sir Jeffrey Amherst, to whom Vaudreuil surrendered in 1760, forthwith
dispatched to the western country a military force to take possession of
the posts still remaining in the hands of the French. The mission was
entrusted to a stalwart New Hampshire Scotch-Irishman, Major Robert
Rogers, who as leader of a band of intrepid "rangers" had made himself
the hero of the northern frontier. Two hundred men were chosen for the
undertaking, and on the 13th of September the party, in fifteen
whaleboats, started up the St. Lawrence for Detroit.

At the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, near the site of the present city of
Cleveland, the travelers were halted by a band of Indian chiefs and
warriors who, in the name of their great ruler Pontiac, demanded to
know the object of their journeying. Parleys followed, in which Pontiac
himself took part, and it was explained that the French had surrendered
Canada to the English and that the English merely proposed to assume
control of the western posts, with a view to friendly relations between
the red men and the white men. The rivers, it was promised, would
flow with rum, and presents from the great King would be forthcoming
in endless profusion. The explanation seemed to satisfy the savages,
and, after smoking the calumet with due ceremony, the chieftain and
his followers withdrew.
Late in November, Rogers and his men in their whaleboats appeared
before the little palisaded town of Detroit. They found the French
commander, Beletre, in surly humor and seeking to stir up the
neighboring Wyandots and Potawatomi against them. But the attempt
failed, and there was nothing for Beletre to do but yield. The French
soldiery marched out of the fort, laid down their arms, and were sent
off as prisoners down the river. The fleur-de-lis, which for more than
half a century had floated over the village, was hauled down, and, to
the accompaniment of cheers, the British ensign was run up. The red
men looked on with amazement at this display of English authority and
marveled how the conquerors forbore to slay their vanquished enemies
on the spot.
Detroit in 1760 was a picturesque, lively, and rapidly growing frontier
town. The central portions of the settlement, lying within the bounds of
the present city, contained ninety or a hundred small houses, chiefly of
wood and roofed with bark or thatch. A well-built range of barracks
afforded quarters for the soldiery, and there were two public
buildings--a council house and a little church. The whole was
surrounded by a square palisade twenty-five feet high, with a wooden
bastion at each corner and a blockhouse over each gateway. A broad
passageway, the chemin du ronde, lay next to the palisade, and on little
narrow streets at the center the houses were grouped closely together.
Above and below the fort the banks of the river were lined on both
sides, for a distance of eight or nine miles, with little rectangular farms,
so laid out as to give each a water-landing. On each farm was a cottage,

with a garden and orchard, surrounded by a fence of rounded pickets;
and the countryside rang with the shouts and laughter of a prosperous
and happy peasantry. Within the limits of the settlement were villages
of Ottawas, Potawatomi, and Wyandots, with whose inhabitants the
French lived on free and easy terms. "The joyous sparkling of the
bright blue water," writes Parkman; "the green luxuriance of the woods;
the white dwellings, looking out from the foliage; and in the distance
the Indian wigwams curling their smoke against the sky--all were
mingled in one broad scene of