by Chad Fraser
The rest of the exhausted men, including Dollier and Galinée, stumbled to the beach to survey the damage. It was worse than they thought, for the altar and sacraments the fathers would need to establish their mission had been washed into the lake and lost. There was now no other choice; returning to Montreal was the only option. But they decided to do so by continuing on to Lake Superior anyway, still reversing Jolliet’s original route. They would then head for Montreal via the northern route on the Ottawa River.
As they passed out of Lake Erie, the hunting remained excellent, something that the Sulpicians attributed, at least in part, to an act of faith (or more appropriately, vandalism) that they committed while ascending the Detroit River to Lake St. Clair. Spotting a large rock on shore that was painted in a human likeness and praised by local Natives as a spiritual guardian, the men, still furious that they would be unable to set up their planned mission, disembarked from their canoes and set upon the statue with axes, smashing it to the extent that they carried the largest pieces out to the middle of the river and dropped them into the water. “I leave you to imagine whether we revenged upon this idol, which the Iroquois had strongly recommended us to honor, the loss of our chapel,” Galinée writes. “We attributed to it even the dearth of provisions from which we had hitherto suffered.” Galinée makes no note of the response of the local Native people, other than to mention in passing that they were camped in the area, but he concludes: “God rewarded us immediately for this good action, for we killed a roebuck and a bear that very day.”
Finally, after an uneventful voyage on Lake Huron and through northern Georgian Bay, the Sulpicians arrived at Sault Ste Marie, where they were welcomed by a group of Jesuit missionaries who had established themselves there not long before. No doubt here, in the hostile backwoods of North America, any rivalry between the orders would have been set aside for the benefit of the rare company of other Frenchmen.
After a stay of only three days, Dollier and Galinée, still anxious to return to Montreal, hired a Native guide and set out on the last leg of their long journey home, finally arriving there after twenty-two days and dozens of back-breaking portages. On June 18, 1670, they entered the city. Galinée, sick with fever when they returned, wrote simply of that day: “We were looked upon rather as persons risen from the dead than as common men.”
Photo by author
A monument erected by Parks Canada to mark the spot where Dollier and Galinée claimed the Lake Erie region for France.
They had been gone 347 days.
Soldiers and Shipwrights
Ten years later, as La Salle rushed to La Motte’s aid, his 1669 expedition to Erie’s edge with Dollier and Galinée would certainly have been on his mind. Little is known about the years of his life immediately following his expedition to the Ohio. Some historians claim that La Salle set out on another expedition between 1671 and 1673 that culminated in the discoveries of both the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers, but there is no firm evidence of this. What is known is that he turned up in Quebec in late 1670 and, short of money, was back in Montreal again in 1672.
Then, in a pattern that was becoming common in La Salle’s story, his luck took a dramatic turn for the better thanks to a new alliance with the aristocracy — this time with New France’s powerful new governor, Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac.
There were a number of similarities between the two men: both were headstrong leaders who employed an authoritarian style; both were willing to go to great lengths to make money; and, most importantly, both heartily disliked the Jesuits, whom they saw as too entangled in the colony’s affairs.
Frontenac, like La Salle, was also a divisive character in New France. He went against Colbert’s policy of maintaining a compact, self-sufficient colony. Likely more for personal gain than for any other reason, he frustrated the minister’s intentions by establishing Fort Cataraqui well beyond the settled boundaries of New France, on the site of Kingston, Ontario. This action had the predictable effect of inflaming both the Jesuits and the traders. The Jesuits worried about the impact of the fort, and the brandy trade that was sure to follow it, on the surrounding First Nations. The traders, particularly those based in nearby Montreal, were incensed because they saw Fort Cataraqui as a threat to their livelihood, intercepting furs farther up the St. Lawrence River.
La Salle, on Frontenac’s recommendation, sailed to France in 1674. Travelling to the court at Versailles, the ambitious explorer successfully petitioned the king to grant him Fort Cataraqui, exclusive trading rights to the land surrounding it, and even letters of nobility for himself and his descendants (La Salle later renamed the fort Frontenac in honour of his wealthy patron). It was during the return voyage that La Salle met Father Hennepin, yet another priest who would play a vital role in the exploration of Lake Erie.
But even in the face of the enormous wealth that his newfound stake in the western fur trade offered, the desire for further exploration did not leave La Salle. Two years after taking up residence at Fort Frontenac, he was back in France, this time seeking permission to construct two more forts. One would be at the entrance to Lake Erie and the other at the southern end of Lake Michigan, from which he hoped to explore the American Midwest. Though he was by now being derided in France as “fit and ready for the madhouse,” his perseverance and oratorical skills won the day again, and he was permitted to carry out his plan to explore the western part of North America.
For La Salle, the pieces were now quickly beginning to come together: after procuring royal permission, he put the wealth he had acquired at Fort Frontenac to work, going on something of a shopping spree in France, hiring shipwrights and purchasing rigging, sails, and iron fixtures that were not yet available in the colony.
His crew was also beginning to take shape. He had convinced the young La Motte de Lucière to come back to New France with him, and had made connections, through the influential Prince de Conti, with Henri de Tonty. A former soldier like La Motte, Tonty’s hand had been torn away by a grenade, and his arm was subsequently fitted with an iron prosthesis. But, far from being discouraged, and possessing almost boundless energy, young Tonty was in Paris looking for a new adventure. Conti referred him to La Salle who, according to the Relation of Henri de Tonty Concerning the Explorations of La Salle from 1678 to 1683, Tonty’s narrative of the La Salle expedition, “received me with his usual civility.” In fact, the two men hit it off right away, growing very close during the long voyage back to New France. The packed ship included not only La Salle, Tonty, and La Motte, but thirty shipwrights and carpenters whom La Salle had managed to employ for the expedition. Tonty would go on to become La Salle’s chief lieutenant in the odyssey that lay ahead.
Erie’s First Shipyard
When La Salle’s barque arrived at the Niagara River in early January 1679, he wasted no time in setting off to find out how La Motte and his men were faring. He left the vessel’s pilot, a man named Luc, in charge of the ship and strode toward La Motte’s cabin at Lewiston on his own, likely on snowshoes, a Native invention that rivalled the canoe in usefulness for travel in Canada.
He walked straight into a scene of disappointment. La Motte, still rattled by his encounter with the Iroquois at Tagarondies, had done little to advance the project further. This, La Salle quickly rectified; on January 22, he marched La Motte and his men around Niagara Falls to what is now known as Cayuga Creek. This, he felt, would be an excellent site for the construction of his vessel, which he had decided to name the Griffon, after the mythical winged beast on Governor Frontenac’s coat of arms. At the point where the creek empties into the Niagara River, he put La Motte and his men to work building a dock and a number of small cabins. Shortly afterward, La Salle would return to the mouth of the Niagara and, on the site of present-day Fort Niagara, build his own small fort, Conti, a tribute to the prince who had referred the young Tonty to La Salle in Paris.
But just as things were starting to look up for the beleaguered crew, a messenger arrived
to inform La Salle that the barque that had carried him to the Niagara, and was loaded with the Griffon’s sails and outfitting, had been wrecked at its mooring on Lake Ontario. La Salle and a few men rushed to the scene. The official narrative, Relation of the Discoveries and Voyages of Cavelier de La Salle from 1679 to 1681, which La Salle may or may not have had a hand in writing, describes the incident: “His vessel, laden with merchandise, suffered shipwreck on the southern shore of the lake [Lake Ontario] . . . through the fault of the pilot, who, with all the sailors, left it in order to go ashore to sleep.”
Illustration courtesy of National Archives of Canada C-001225
A late seventeenth-century impression of the building of La Salle’s Griffon, the first ship to sail on Lake Erie.
La Salle was furious. He had expressly told Luc to beware of the fierce storms that frequently ravage western Lake Ontario. But Luc, newly arrived from France, had not taken the explorer’s warnings seriously. The result was the Great Lakes’ first-ever shipwreck. There would, unfortunately, be a great many to follow, and Luc would only be the first of many navigators to underestimate the lakes’ ferocity.
With the men only able to recover a very small number of the supplies that the barque carried, the expedition was again in serious trouble. In a desperate bid to resupply his men, La Salle decided to set off for Fort Frontenac on foot, leaving Tonty in charge. The trip was a testament to La Salle’s physical strength, as the official Relation bears out:
One day when he was in haste to get back to Fort Frontenac, he undertook the journey . . . by land and on foot with only a little sack of Indian corn, — even this becoming exhausted while he was still at a distance of two days’ journey from the fort where, however, he did not fail to arrive safely.
But, despite the setbacks, in La Salle’s absence work carried on at the ramshackle shipyard, which by now consisted only of a few crude outbuildings. Father Hennepin describes them as “cabins made of rinds of trees; and I had one made on purpose to perform Divine Service therein on Sundays, and other occasions.”
By January 26, just before La Salle returned to Fort Frontenac, the keel of the Griffon was laid. The men continued to labour throughout the winter, which, thankfully, was reasonably mild. But the project continued to push them to their limits. The loss of the barque on Lake Ontario meant that provisions were cut nearly to starvation levels and, even though La Salle and La Motte had both made additional efforts to win the Iroquois’ approval, they remained a menace, as Hennepin describes:
. . . they came now and then to our dock, and expressed some discontent at what we were doing. One of them, in particular, feigning himself drunk, attempted to kill our [black]smith, but was vigorously repulsed with a red-hot iron bar, which, along with the reprimand he received from me, obliged him to be gone.
This incident was followed a few days later by a visit from an Iroquois woman who informed the Frenchmen that the men of her tribe had resolved to “burn our ship in the dock, and had certainly done it, had we not always been upon our guard.” By spring, incidents like these were beginning to take their toll, along with enduring intense privation and cold. Despite Tonty’s best efforts to placate the men, murmurs of desertion began to reverberate more loudly through the tiny camp.
In May, the Griffon was finally set afloat in the Niagara. The frightened, exhausted men, eager to be aboard ship, where they were safe from the threat posed by the Iroquois, immediately quit their crude huts and slung up their hammocks below the Griffon’s main deck. Hennepin, displaying his usual flair for the dramatic, describes the Iroquois’ reaction to this turn of events:
The Iroquois being returned from hunting beavers, were mightily surprised to see our ship afloat . . . they could not comprehend how in so short a time we had been able to build so great a ship, though it was but sixty tons. It might have been called a moving fortress; for all the savages inhabiting the banks of those lakes and rivers I have mentioned . . . were filled with fear as well as admiration when they saw it.
If the Iroquois were even half as impressed as Hennepin says, it is not hard to imagine the lift that this would have given to the sagging morale of La Salle’s shipwrights.
The Fate of the Griffon
Back at Fort Frontenac, La Salle was dealing with his own morale problems. His growing band of enemies had been eagerly spreading the word about the struggles of the Lake Erie expedition. This made La Salle’s task of re-provisioning his men even more difficult, as the official Relation describes:
Meanwhile, those who were envious of M. de La Salle — seeing that, despite the difficulties attending the transport of the rigging through so many rapids, and despite the opposition of the Iroquois, his vessel was finished — gave out that the undertaking was a rash one, that he would never come back, and many other like things. By such talk they aroused all M. de La Salle’s creditors, who, without awaiting his return and without notifying him, made seizure of all the goods he possessed at Montreal and at Quebec, even to his secretary’s bed, having them appraised at their own rates, although Fort Frontenac alone, of which he is the proprietor, would suffice to pay all his debts twice over, should he die in the prosecution of his discoveries.
Needless to say, the official Relation must have made fascinating reading for the French minister of marine, to whom it was submitted in the early 1680s.
Despite all this, La Salle, anxious for news of his Griffon and “judging that the harm was done, and that his foes had no other aim than to cause him to miss a journey for which he had prepared with so great effort and expense,” set off again for Fort Conti, again with a fully loaded vessel, arriving in early August.
What he saw must have utterly astonished him. The Griffon, complete, was swinging at anchor on the Niagara River. The tiny ship consisted only of a main deck, with a large aft cabin and space in the hold for extra hammocks. For armament, the Griffon carried only seven small iron guns of various types, and was only about eighteen metres long and 4.5 metres at the beam. A plain vessel with very simple sail rigging and little intricate carving, save for a figurehead, the Griffon also had little colour to its hull; it had been treated instead with pine tar and coated with varnishes of pine resin.
Tonty had already tried to get her out of the river and onto the lake, but with a steady unfavourable wind, found he could make no progress against the strong current. Here, again, La Salle took control. With the men pulling hard on ropes from shore, the Griffon slowly, steadily edged forward, until it finally overcame the current and emerged out onto the open lake. As it did so, the men, thirty-four in all, including Hennepin and two other Récollet missionaries, scrambled aboard.
Lake Erie had her first sailing ship.
Considering the struggles so far, it is perhaps ironic that the first sailing across the lake was rather uneventful, aside from a near collision with Long Point in heavy fog. Again, the Relation provides perhaps the best retelling of the trip: “He [La Salle] set out on the 7th of August of the same year, 1679, shaping his course west by south; and his navigation was so fortunate, that on the morning of the 10th . . . he reached the mouth of the strait through which Lake Huron pours into Lake Erie [the Detroit River] . . .”
Tonty, who had been sent ahead to meet the barque at the Detroit River, was camped near present-day Colchester when he saw the ship, after passing around Point Pelee and through the treacherous Pelee Passage, emerge unscathed: “We were encamped at the entrance to the Detroit, where there was so little ground on account of a marsh laying behind us that, as the wind was blowing fresh from the northeast across the lake, the waves began to dash over us, awakening us earlier than we should have wished. At daybreak, sighting the barque, we made three smoking signal fires, when she put in toward land. We ran out to her in a canoe.”
The Griffon, following the same route as Dollier and Galinée ten years before, passed up the Detroit River and through Lake St. Clair, the latter of which the three Récollets aboard the ship named as they passed through. The Grif
fon then entered Lake Huron, fighting the wind all the way, along with a fierce storm on August 24 that nearly wrecked the tiny ship. Only the pilot, Luc, managed to keep his head and steer the crew to safety while the rest of the men, huddled together on deck and prayed for their lives. It would be the highlight of Luc’s short career on the Great Lakes.
The Griffon finally arrived at the Jesuit mission at Michilimackinac, in northern Michigan, at the end of August. The Jesuits, along with their Native charges, were awestruck by the ship, her white sails spread full against the sky as she dropped anchor. After they paddled out to greet the Griffon in their canoes, and were welcomed aboard by La Salle’s weary crew, the explorer managed to make contact with an advance party he had sent forward to trade for furs. (Some of these men had in fact deserted to the area of Sault Ste Marie, probably thinking La Salle would never make it as far as Michilimackinac. Tonty eventually had to go and bring them back.) The traders had been successful — La Salle loaded more than 12,000 livres worth of furs into the Griffon’s hold, more than enough to appease his anxious creditors at Quebec and fetch him a tidy profit in the process.
His men now back aboard and his financial future secured, La Salle decided to use the Griffon to speed him even further on his voyage, sailing her onto Lake Michigan as far as present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin. Here, he made a fateful decision that would end the expedition’s brief period of peace for good. Left with a small crew of men and four canoes to continue his journey, and convinced that his explorations were back on track, La Salle decided to continue on into the American Midwest, sending Luc and the Griffon back to Niagara to unload the furs and ship them back to Montreal. Once this was done, they were to sail the Griffon back to La Salle at Green Bay.