Lake Erie Stories

by Chad Fraser

  La Salle begrudgingly accepted Courcelle’s terms, but he must have been seething inside. The independent-minded young man had left the ultra-conservative Society of Jesus so he could explore and trade on his own and now here he was, forced to embark on the adventure of a lifetime with two priests in tow.

  But he needn’t have worried about his travelling companions. Dollier was more than qualified for what lay ahead; a giant of a man and a former soldier in the French army, he was said to be so strong he could carry two men sitting in his hands. He had been in New France since 1666, and had served as an army chaplain during the offensives against the Iroquois before venturing to Fort Sainte-Anne on Lake George to serve as a missionary. Here, he played a role in saving the garrison from a bout of scurvy.

  Galinée, a Sulpician priest all his life, had studied mathematics and astronomy at the Sorbonne before arriving in New France in 1668. He was said to have at least a working knowledge of Native languages, and it was to be his job to create a written record of the expedition’s travels, which he did brilliantly, proving that he was also a talented writer. The journal he left behind is a highly detailed and historically important document without which we would know precious little about the earliest European explorations of Lake Erie.

  The expedition, consisting of seven canoes, each carrying three men, set off on July 6, 1669, guided by two Iroquois canoes. Aboard were the same men who had camped at La Salle’s seigneury the previous winter and had told him about the Ohio River. Galinée provides an excellent description of the versatile craft that carried the men on their way:

  These are little birchbark canoes, about twenty feet long and two feet wide, strengthened inside with cedar floors and gunwales, very thin, so that one man carries it with ease, although the boat is capable of carrying four men and eight or nine hundred pounds weight in baggage . . . This style of canoe affords the most convenient and commonest mode of navigation in this country, although it is a true saying that when a person is in one of these vessels he is always, not a finger’s breadth, but the thickness of five or six sheets of paper, from death.

  The Frenchmen, many still unaccustomed to living outdoors in the backwoods of New France, also found the Native diet quite disagreeable by European standards. According to Galinée:

  The ordinary diet is Indian corn, called in France Turkey wheat, which is ground between two stones and boiled in water; the seasoning is with meat or fish, when you have any. This way of living seemed to us all so extraordinary that we felt the effects of it. Not one of us was exempt from some sort of illness . . .

  Fortunately for the French members of the party, fish were abundant, and one “had only to throw a line in to catch forty or fifty of the kind here called barbue [catfish].” Hunting was also promising, with the men feasting on moose on two occasions during the paddle down the St. Lawrence River.

  The canoeists entered Lake Ontario and made their way along the south shore, entering Irondequoit Bay, at the site of present-day Rochester, New York, on August 11. The voyage continued to be hard on the French, particularly Dollier, who was felled by a fever that Galinée thought would certainly kill his plucky travelling companion. But here is where the venerable Dollier’s innate toughness shone through: as he lay suffering, the stricken father was heard to murmur, “I would rather die in the midst of this forest in the order of the will of God, as I believe I am, than amongst all my brethren at the Seminary of Saint Sulpice.”

  They had no sooner paddled into Irondequoit Bay when the men were immediately greeted by a group of Iroquois bearing gifts. Hoping to win the confidence of these Natives, and thereby make their journey through the area much safer, they reciprocated by offering tools, mainly knives and needles, as well as glass beads and coloured pieces of cloth, which the Iroquois deemed valuable. This prompted the Native party to invite the Frenchmen to accompany them to their nearby village. La Salle, thinking, perhaps, that this could only be a good opportunity to improve relations with these Iroquois, decided to take them up on their offer. So, with Galinée and eight other Frenchmen in tow, he left the canoes with Dollier, now on the mend from his illness, and departed into the forest on foot.

  It was at this village, two days’ hike from the shore, that the Frenchmen saw firsthand the destructive effect the fur traders’ alcohol was having on Native people. After eight days of feasting and meeting with the village elders in council, a shipment of brandy arrived from the Dutch colonies in New York State. Quickly falling under the influence, the Iroquois threatened, according to Galinée, to “break our heads” in retribution for the murder of one of their relations at the hands of a French colonist in Montreal. Then, in this atmosphere of heightened tension, La Salle got a taste of what La Motte would experience ten years later: a young prisoner was brought into the village square and slowly burned with hot irons over the course of six hours while La Salle’s men tried helplessly to intervene (although Galinée’s report indicates that some of the French wished to witness the entire torture from beginning to end). To make matters worse, the Dutch interpreter, whom they had brought with them from Montreal, astonishingly, knew very little French, rendering him utterly useless, particularly in such an extreme situation. The terrified men finally decided to abandon the village when, in Galinée’s words, “everybody assembled in the square with a small stick in his hand, with which they began to beat the cabins on all sides with a very great clatter, to drive away, as they said, the dead man’s soul, which might have hidden itself in some corner to do them harm.”

  La Salle’s party slipped back through the woods to where Dollier and the rest were waiting with the canoes. As they loaded their supplies and took up their paddles, they no doubt hoped that the past few days were not a harbinger of what awaited them as they plunged ahead toward Lake Erie — and the unknown.

  A Fateful Meeting

  September 24, 1669, found the expedition in the small Iroquois village of Tinawatawa, which was located near present-day Hamilton, Ontario. Here, the uneasy cooperation between La Salle and the Sulpicians, which had held up relatively well so far, finally began to unravel.

  Two days earlier, the expedition’s Iroquois guides had received word that two Frenchmen had arrived at Tinawatawa. Unaware of anyone else dispatched this way, La Salle and the Sulpicians decided to send two men ahead to investigate, with the rest following behind to arrive a day or two later.

  One of the two Frenchmen, it turned out, was the French explorer Adrien Jolliet, who had left Montreal a few months before La Salle and the priests to determine the existence of a rumoured copper mine in the Lake Superior region. In the end, Jolliet told La Salle, Dollier, and Galinée that he did not have time to visit the site of the rumoured mine. However, while he was preparing to return to Montreal, the local Ottawa tribe had given him an Iroquois prisoner to take back to the southern lakes as a token of the peace the Ottawa wished to establish with the Iroquois. It was this prisoner who convinced Jolliet to return to Montreal not by the northern route through Georgian Bay and the Ottawa River, but farther south, traversing Lake Huron and Lake St. Clair, passing down the Detroit River, and then paddling east on Lake Erie. In the process of doing so, Jolliet had become the first European known to have set eyes on Lake Erie.

  While Jolliet related the details of his journey, he slipped in the detail that there was at present no mission to many of the tribes who were residing in the area of Lake Superior. This had an immediate and profound impact on Galinée and Dollier, who saw their chance encounter with Jolliet as nothing less than a sign from God. They quickly decided to abandon their Ohio Valley objective and reverse Jolliet’s route to Lake Superior. Jolliet told the two priests that he had left a canoe on the shores of Lake Erie, near present-day Port Stanley, which he invited them to take if the local Native people had not discovered it first. Jolliet had abandoned the craft at the behest of his Iroquois companion, who thought it would be safer for Jolliet to walk along what is now the Grand River and proceed to Tinawatawa on
foot instead of paddling any farther on Lake Erie.

  The meeting cannot have been a pleasant one for La Salle, who viewed Jolliet much differently than the Sulpicians did. The competitive, controlling young man from Rouen would certainly have envied Jolliet his successful — and largely solo — journey of discovery. Indeed, La Salle had undertaken his entire quest for the Ohio and the route to China, risking everything in the process, for the express purpose of being the first one to find it. To La Salle, Jolliet was a rival to be bested, and nothing more.

  But in all of this there was a silver lining that La Salle certainly recognized, and later seized: if the expedition were to split up, and Dollier and Galinée were to go their own way, it would absolve La Salle of his responsibility to Courcelle and de Queylus to accompany the Sulpicians any further. He would be free to find and explore the Ohio River on his own.

  Coincidentally, Galinée reports, La Salle had come down with a fever while he had been out hunting, a few days before the encounter with Jolliet. But, as with many things involving La Salle, the authenticity of his sickness was found to be less than convincing by some of the men, including Galinée, who notes wryly that “Some say it was at the sight of three large rattlesnakes he found in his path whilst climbing a rock that the fever seized him.”

  Whether real or imagined, the illness certainly played into La Salle’s desire to strike out on his own. Galinée writes: “M. de la Salle’s illness was beginning to take away from him the inclination to push farther on, and the desire to see Montreal was beginning to press him. He had not spoken of it to us, but we have clearly perceived it.”

  When the matter was brought up, then, La Salle “begged us [Dollier and Galinée] to excuse him if he abandoned us to return to Montreal, and added that he could not make up his mind to winter in the woods with his men, where their lack of skill and experience might make them die of starvation.”

  With that, the decision was taken to divide the expedition. Again, according to Galinée: “The last day of September M. Dollier said Holy Mass for the second time in this village, where most of us, on M. de la Salle’s side as on ours, received the Sacrament in order to unite in our Lord at a time when we saw ourselves on the point of separating.”

  The next day, Dollier and Galinée paddled toward the Grand River with three canoes, while their Dutch interpreter and two Iroquois warriors made out on foot in a bid to procure Jolliet’s abandoned canoe at Port Stanley before the winter closed in.

  Meanwhile, La Salle kept his own counsel and set off on a very different course than the one ascribed to him by the two priests. Historians still debate the range of La Salle’s travels after his parting with Dollier and Galinée, but some historians believe that La Salle, with roughly four canoes and twelve men, wintered in the Niagara area before setting off for the Ohio River in the spring. They likely would have made it to the Ohio sometime either in the late winter of 1669 or the spring of 1670 (deprived of the meticulous journal-keeping of Galinée, La Salle’s men left no documentary evidence of their explorations), following it as far as present-day Louisville, Kentucky. But the river had not been what La Salle had expected. Full of vegetation, shoals, and countless other obstacles, the mighty Ohio was not navigable to sailing ships. Worse, without the Sulpicians to temper La Salle’s authoritarian leadership style, his men had come to bitterly resent him, and made no effort to hide their growing disdain. This would prove to be his undoing: one night, after the party made camp on the riverbank and La Salle had fallen into a deep sleep, they took the decision to desert. Quietly, they gathered all the supplies they could and disappeared into the forest. The next morning, La Salle awoke to find the camp ransacked and only one loyal Iroquois guide remaining. Angry and bitter, he came to the conclusion that he could go no farther. He dejectedly retreated to Montreal, arriving there late in 1670.

  Ironically, it would be the two Sulpicians who would do the bulk of the exploring in the Lake Erie region over the next year. With the help of a map Galinée had made of Jolliet’s journey from Lake Superior, the priests, along with seven other men from the original expedition, arrived at Lake Erie’s shores in the middle of October. The lake’s sheer expanse overwhelmed the Frenchmen, as Galinée proclaims: “At last we arrived . . . at the shore of Lake Erie, which appeared to us like a great sea because there was a great south wind blowing at the time. There is perhaps no lake in the country in which the waves rise so high, because of its great depth and extent.”

  In hopes of finding the Dutch interpreter and the men sent ahead to find Jolliet’s canoe, which Dollier hoped could replace his worn-out vessel, the party paddled along the Canadian shore, getting as far as Port Dover before the autumn winds made it impossible to go any farther. So here, near the mouth of the Lynn River and with no word from the canoe party, they built a small homestead to wait out the winter, becoming the first Europeans ever to do so on Lake Erie. Galinée was so moved by the beauty of the spot, it inspired him to write of that winter:

  I leave you to imagine whether we suffered in the midst of this abundance in the earthly Paradise of Canada [author’s emphasis]; I call it so because there is assuredly no more beautiful region in all of Canada. The woods are open, interspersed with beautiful meadows, watered by rivers and rivulets filled with fish and beaver, an abundance of fruits, and what is important, so full of game that we saw there at one time more than a hundred roebucks in a single band, herds of fifty or sixty hinds, and bears fatter and of better flavour than the most savory pigs of France. In short, we may say that we passed the winter more comfortably than we should have done in Montreal.

  Photo by author

  A view from the wintering place of Dollier and Galinée near Port Dover.

  Astonishingly, Galinée even foretells Lake Erie’s prosperous wine industry, which wouldn’t seriously take root for another two hundred years, when he writes:

  . . . the vine grows here only in sand, on banks of lakes and rivers but although it has no cultivation it does not fail to produce grapes in great quantities as large and as sweet as the finest of France. We even made wine of them, with which M. Dollier said Holy Mass all winter . . .

  Here, in two small cabins, the Sulpicians passed five months and eleven days of one of the harshest winters yet experienced by the French in Canada. In one cabin, they built a small altar, where they said Mass three times a week. As the temperature dropped and the snow flew outside of their snug abode, no one else ventured past for three whole months, until one day late in the winter, the fathers encountered a number of Iroquois who had come to the area to hunt beaver. According to Galinée: “They used to visit us and found us in a very good cabin whose construction they admired, and afterward they brought every Indian who passed that way to see it.”

  Photo by author

  A monument marking where René de Bréhant de Galinée and François Dollier de Casson spent the winter of 1669–70. They were the first Europeans to winter on Lake Erie.

  On March 23, 1670, three days before setting out again, the missionaries claimed the “earthly paradise” in the name of King Louis XIV. On a hill overlooking the lake, they erected a large cross, along with an inscription outlining not only the land claim, but the fact that the party had been the first Europeans ever to winter in the area.

  Unfortunately for the Sulpicians, however, Lake Erie did not awake from her winter slumber in a cheerful mood. On the second day out of Port Dover, near what is now called Turkey Point, the wind caught Galinée’s empty canoe while the party was windbound on shore and blew it out into the open water. Two men attempted to save it, but after nearly drowning themselves in the freezing water, finally decided to let it go. With only two canoes remaining, the party again split up; supplies were shifted into the remaining boats and five men went ahead on foot, with four paddling the canoes. The two groups met sporadically on the way down the coast, including a strenuous portage over Long Point, before finally finding Jolliet’s canoe hidden between two trees at Kettle Creek in Port S
tanley. Strangely, though, there was no sign of the Dutchman and the two Iroquois.

  And there never would be. Over the centuries since the Dollier and Galinée expedition, no trace of these men has ever been found. It was among the first of many mysteries that now colour Lake Erie’s long and storied history.

  With everyone now embarked in the canoes, the party made much quicker progress than it did when over half of the men had to struggle through the dense, untracked forests of southern Ontario. But still, by the time they reached Point Pelee, weeks later, they were exhausted and completely out of provisions. The saving grace had been that game had proven abundant during this leg of the journey, especially in the area of present-day Rondeau Provincial Park.

  But this would be the only good news for the party. For it was here, on Canada’s southernmost mainland point, that Lake Erie finally lost her patience with the Sulpicians and struck their expedition with what would amount to a fatal blow. Galinée describes:

  We landed there on a beautiful sand beach on the east side of the point. We had made that day nearly twenty leagues, so we were all very much tired. That was the reason why we did not carry all our packs up on the high ground, but left them on the sand and carried our canoes up to the high ground. Night came on and we slept so soundly that a great north-east wind rising had time to agitate the lake with such violence that the water rose six feet where we were, and carried away the packs of M. Dollier’s canoe that were nearest the water and would have carried away the rest if one of us had not awoke. Astonished to hear the lake roaring so furiously, he went to the beach to see if the baggage was safe, and seeing that the water already came as far as the packs that were placed the highest, cried out that all was lost.