by Chad Fraser
Standing on the shore, La Salle watched his prized vessel, with its small fortune in furs, fade off into the distance, firing a salute from one of her iron cannons as she went.
It would be the last time anyone would see the Griffon and her small crew.
In the Name of the King
For La Salle, the disappearance of the Griffon would only be the latest in the long line of humiliations that had bedevilled his explorations for more than ten years. In the aftermath, the explorer was convinced that Luc and the Griffon’s crew had stolen his furs and then burned the ship. But the fact that neither the men nor the furs were ever seen again points to a far different fate; more likely the Griffon met her end in a storm somewhere on Lake Michigan or possibly Lake Huron. In hindsight, it could easily be argued that for the tiny ship to have made the arduous voyage a second time in safety would be nothing short of a miracle; with no suitable marine charts available — and considering Luc’s previously demonstrated recklessness in losing the supply barque on Lake Ontario — the odds were certainly stacked against the Griffon.
Though archaeologists have not been able to positively identify the wreck of the Griffon in the years since, they have uncovered a number of strong candidates. Two potential sites lie near Manitoulin Island in Georgian Bay, an area renowned for its incredible number of submerged rocks and shoals, and on Lake Michigan near Escanaba, just north of where La Salle last saw the ship at Green Bay.
In any case, after the explorer wished the Griffon’s crew luck and dispatched them back to Niagara, he continued on foot and by canoe south on Lake Michigan with fourteen men, including Tonty, and built a small fort at the mouth of the St. Joseph River before continuing on as far as present-day Peoria, Illinois. Here, the men laid the groundwork for yet another, more permanent fort, this one named Fort Crèvecoeur, or heartbreak — a tribute to the many troubles the explorer had endured to reach this spot.
But as the months passed and with still no word from the Griffon, La Salle began to grow more and more worried. Finally, on March 19, 1680, he decided to retrace his steps in search of his ship and return toward Lake Erie. He set out with a small number of men, travelling at first by canoe and then mostly on foot, “through woods so thickly intertwined with briars and thorns that in two and a half days his men had their clothes torn to shreds, and their faces so covered with blood and slashed that they were not recognizable.”
On April 21, he arrived back at Fort Conti, which he discovered (perhaps not entirely to his surprise) had been burned to the ground by the Iroquois after he had sailed away from it aboard the Griffon the previous summer. Despondent that he had not yet been able to find any trace of the ship, he continued on to Montreal, where he knew he would need all of his oratorical skills to placate his ever-anxious creditors, who continued to dog him at every turn. In all, the trip from Lake Michigan was a voyage that the official Relation, in perhaps only a mild exaggeration, described as “the most toilsome that ever any Frenchman has ever undertaken in America.”
But the stubborn La Salle still refused to be stopped. Over the next two years, while continuing to sink deeper and deeper into debt, he would again reunite with the men he had left at Fort Crèvecoeur. But as if he had not suffered enough, he was in line for further disappointment when he learned that most of these had deserted in the interim, raiding the fort’s stores and leaving poor Tonty to rely on the surrounding Native people for his very survival.
And yet, this was still only the beginning of La Salle’s troubles.
His mission continued; fighting starvation, thanks to the loss of the supplies he had expected the Griffon to bring back, he eventually made his way to the Mississippi River, pursuing it as far as present-day Vernon, Louisiana, near the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. There, in a small and sombre ceremony on April 9, 1682, he claimed the entire territory of Louisiana in the name of King Louis XIV.
It made for a rare scene indeed, especially in the wild backwoods of the South. La Salle appeared in all the regalia of the old country — including a gold-laced red cloak — and, surrounded by his remaining men, erected a cross on the site with a plate buried beneath it that bore a simple inscription: “In the name of Louis XIV, King of France and of Navarre, this ninth of April, 1682.”
With this simple act, La Salle had expanded New France’s boundaries far beyond anyone’s expectations, including, it appeared, the king’s. When word of La Salle’s Louisiana claim reached the royal court some months later, Louis XIV was heard to exclaim that the explorer’s discovery was “very useless.”
The main problem was that all of this sudden expansion left the colony spread dangerously thin, leaving the new French claim open to a range of challenges, not the least of which came from the many Native tribes living in the territory.
It seemed that Colbert’s warnings about pushing the boundaries of New France too far were already beginning to come true.
Back in France, the royal court had finally run out of patience with La Salle. The explorer had made it back to the mother country early in 1684 with yet another grand plan, this one involving the settlement of a new colony in Louisiana which, he hoped, would form the basis of a massive French presence in the Midwest. But the king was so thoroughly fed up with La Salle by this point that he was no longer welcome at the royal court; he had to propose his idea in a written report.
It was a far cry from the heady days when La Salle could count on having the rapt attention of the most influential members of the French elite.
But La Salle did have one more trick up his sleeve: he had made sure that the maps that were shown to the king were slightly altered, showing the mouth of the Mississippi to be much closer to Spanish holdings in New Mexico. In other words, an ideal base from which to launch an attack on France’s colonizing rivals. To further entice the king, La Salle wrote that the river would make an excellent port for an armada, even though the explorer knew this not to be the case. The king also learned that La Salle could command an army of thousands of Native warriors — yet another figment of the explorer’s overactive imagination.
Nonetheless, it was on this flimsy basis that La Salle sailed from France on August 1, 1684, with a flotilla of four ships and 288 settlers, including a number of women and La Salle’s brother Jean, bound for the Gulf of Mexico. It was a horrible trip: like almost all of La Salle’s journeys it was plagued by sickness, lack of drinking water and provisions, and, of course, desertions. The Spanish captured one ship, which contained a large portion of the party’s supplies, and another ran aground in the Gulf. In the end, only thirty-six souls, including La Salle, were left to soldier onward.
Here, in the harsh backwoods of the South, La Salle’s bad temper and aggressive leadership style finally undid him. In Texas, on the night of March 18, 1687, five settlers crept into the tent of three of his most trusted lieutenants, including his nephew and a Native guide who had been with La Salle for years. While the men slept, the five set upon them with axes, killing all three.
The next day, while a distraught La Salle was angrily questioning his men about the murder of his closest friends, he did not notice Pierre Duhaut, a merchant and one of La Salle’s many creditors, lying in wait in the tall grass, his musket at the ready. When La Salle moved close enough, Duhaut seized the opportunity, leaping forward and firing at point-blank range. The bullet found its mark; La Salle slumped over and was immediately dead.
The conspirators then stripped his body naked, taking even his scarlet cloak, which had survived all of the explorer’s many shipwrecks, and left his corpse lying out in the open. Just days later, three of the plotters, ostensibly during an argument over trade goods, but by now probably feeling the full weight of what they had done, shot each other to death in a last, desperate bid to avoid justice. The rest of the party, sick and half-starved, slowly made their way to Montreal on foot, arriving there over a year later, on July 13, 1688.
Louis Joutel, a member of the failed expedition, writing in his Journal of th
e Last Voyage Performed by Monsieur de La Salle, provides both an excellent description of La Salle’s troubled character and the main reason for the explorer’s ultimate demise:
Such was the unfortunate end of Monsieur de la Salle’s life, at a time when he might entertain the greatest hopes, as the reward of his labours. He had the capacity and talent to make his enterprise successful; his constancy and courage and his extraordinary knowledge of arts and sciences, which rendered him fit for anything, together with an indefatigable body, which made him surmount all difficulties, would have procured a glorious issue to his undertaking, had not all those excellent qualities been counterbalanced by too haughty a behaviour, which sometimes made him insupportable, and by a rigidness toward those that were under his command, which at last drew upon him an implacable hatred, and was the occasion of his death.
Despite his troubles, La Salle’s explorations of the Mississippi and the Midwest are his greatest legacy. But the construction and sailing of his tiny Griffon marked a watershed in the history of the Great Lakes, as well. With this single event, Europeans no longer saw the lakes as vast, undiscovered bodies, but as an integral part of a new and lucrative fur-trading network. To underscore the point, over the next eighty years, more and more voyages would be made upon them, further uniting New France with the continent’s rich interior. Lake Erie, with all of its vast potential, was beginning to take its place as the foundation of a new North American empire.
With the charting of the lake, however, came new and unexpected rivalries. French aspirations on the continent would begin to crumble in earnest by the mid-eighteenth century when the British, now hemmed in along the eastern seaboard, began to feel threatened by the giant French claim now stretching across the entire Midwest. More and more, British settlers and traders began to challenge this claim, making an armed confrontation almost inevitable.
In 1754, things came to a head when the first shots of the Seven Years’ War (known as the French and Indian War in North America) were fired by a small British detachment under a young lieutenant-colonel, George Washington, in the same Ohio Valley that had so entranced La Salle over eighty years earlier. In a foreshadowing of even greater conflict to come for Washington, he wrote excitedly of his first action in the field against French forces: “I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.”
As Colbert had predicted, the French had stretched their boundaries too far, and their army was spread so thin that the British steadily pushed them back to Quebec until, in 1763, the dream of New France died forever when British General James Wolfe forced the capitulation of the city on the Plains of Abraham.
The ensuing peace would be short-lived. Little more than a decade later, a new player would emerge to challenge the British for control of the lakes, this one from a quite unexpected quarter. In 1776, the nascent United States of America declared her independence from Britain, triggering another bloody war that would drag on for seven more years until, under Washington’s steady leadership, she would claim her place — ironically, with the help of the French — among the world’s free nations.
In the first few years of the nineteenth century, the newborn country, now looking to consolidate its territorial gains, would continue the colonization La Salle had begun and launch a massive campaign of expansion into the Lake Erie region. But this intrusion of new settlers into traditional Native lands would once again stoke the fires of conflict. What ensued was a war that would determine the ultimate fate of not only one lake, but an entire continent.
Chapter 2
“We Have Met the Enemy”: The War of 1812 on Lake Erie
As the nineteenth century dawned, the land surrounding the western basin of Lake Erie remained mostly untamed wilderness. Passing groups of Native tribesmen hunted and trapped on the Lake Erie islands, but aside from a few adventurers who happened this way, the archipelago remained unsettled.
But change was taking place all along Lake Erie’s southern coast. The newly formed United States was expanding steadily westward and settlers, driven by adventure and cheap land on America’s frontier, were beginning to arrive in steadily growing numbers. By the summer of 1812, many had carved small farmsteads out of the forests of modern-day Ohio and Pennsylvania. The migration eventually found its way onto the islands in the autumn of 1811, when seven families, led by Seth Done of Ohio, cleared one hundred acres at what would later become the settlement of Put-in-Bay on South Bass Island. The location was perfect, with fertile soil and a deep, well-protected harbour. By the summer of 1812, the colonists had raised a crop of wheat and constructed a number of log cabins and outbuildings at Put-in-Bay.
But there was a dark cloud hanging over all of this seemingly idyllic development; as the settlers pushed north and west into the Great Lakes region from America’s eastern seaboard, they forced many Native nations off their traditional lands, creating friction, and sometimes violence, between the two groups. Exacerbating this was the fact that many First Nations already had trade and military ties with the British in Upper Canada, who supplied them with gifts of weapons, tools, and ornaments in order to sustain their loyalty. By 1810, many Ohio Natives had banded together under the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, who was on friendly terms with Major-General Isaac Brock, the commander of all British military operations in Upper Canada.
By early 1812, an atmosphere that can only be described as sheer terror pervaded the small American Lake Erie settlements, fuelled mainly by the horrifying tales of torture and kidnapping at the hands of fierce Native warriors that had quickly spread throughout the communities. As journalist and South Bass Island resident Lydia Ryall put it a century later in her 1913 book, Sketches and Stories of the Lake Erie Islands, this was a period “when tomahawk and scalping knife hung constantly over the heads of lake shore and island dwellers, and life for them was one continued round of apprehension.” Out of fear, many farmers slept with their muskets close at hand.
The situation came to a boil immediately after America declared war on Great Britain in June 1812. Later that summer, Done’s party was ambushed and driven from Put-in-Bay by a band of British scouts and their Native allies. After looting and burning the settlers’ cabins and outbuildings, they set fire to the wheat crop, reducing it to smoldering embers. All too aware of their vulnerable situation, the colonists had, just days earlier, tried to save thousands of bushels by rowing them across to the Ohio mainland, but British and Native scouts later found the crop hidden in a decrepit storehouse and burned it as well.
So ended the first attempt to settle the Lake Erie islands, but they would play a key role in the coming struggle for control of the lake, and in the process would bear witness to the bloodiest naval battle ever to occur on the Great Lakes.
Erie in the Crosshairs
When U.S. President James Madison officially declared war, most Americans believed that taking Canada would be, in the oft-quoted words of his predecessor Thomas Jefferson, “a mere matter of marching.” But any expectations of an early victory were soon dashed. Isaac Brock knew that it was crucial for the British forces in Upper Canada to strike first if they were to defeat the Americans, who vastly outnumbered them and were largely fighting on their home soil. To that end, he wasted little time going on the attack, gathering a force of 1,300 men, consisting mostly of local Canadian militia and Native warriors, and setting off for Fort Detroit. After a short skirmish on August 16, 1812, Brock promptly surrounded the fort and placed it under siege, trapping American General William Hull and 2,000 soldiers inside. Outnumbered nearly two to one, Brock knew he would not be able to maintain the siege for long. If an upset British victory was to be achieved on this day, a desperate gamble was his only chance.
Keenly aware that the Americans feared the tactics of his Native allies above almost everything else, Brock dispatched one of his aides to the beseiged fort. Once allowed inside the gates, he presented Hull with a letter from Brock demanding Hull’s surrender. The letter went on to make spe
cific mention of the Natives, noting that while Brock did not wish to launch a “war of extermination,” his Native allies would be “beyond control the moment the contest commences.”
As it turned out, Brock’s instinct was on the mark. Hull immediately surrendered Fort Detroit and the surrounding Michigan Territory without a shot being fired. The British occupation of Michigan would hold strong for a full year, until it was finally toppled by the Americans in late 1813.
Although Brock’s success at Detroit boosted British morale, it reinforced to his commanders back in Kingston, Ontario, and especially to Sir George Prevost, the newly minted governor of British North America, that control of the Great Lakes would be imperative in mounting any kind of defence of the colony. Lake Erie was especially important, as Fort Malden (then known as Fort Amherstburg), in Amherstburg, Ontario, was provisioned almost exclusively through a waterborne supply line stretching to it from Long Point. If the Americans were able to cut that line, it would be only a matter of time before the entire Western District of Upper Canada fell into their hands.
But the optimistic Prevost felt he had an important edge over his opponents in this area. Fifty-five years earlier, during the Seven Years’ War, the British had established the Provincial Marine, a permanent armed fleet on the Great Lakes. Back then, this tiny force had been especially effective against the French. But the Marine had faltered badly in the years since 1763, and had been reduced to a sort of glorified water taxi, shuttling troops and supplies from one port to another. It had too few sailors, and most of those who remained had no combat experience. Some of its officers, no doubt enjoying the relative ease and safety of Marine life, stayed in their jobs well into their elderly years.
