Aristopia/Chapter 19
The arduous task of King William in firmly establishing the throne which lie had acquired in so peculiar a manner, left him little time in the early part of his reign to meddle with the American colonies; but in after years he reduced Maryland to a royal colony and meddled considerably with the charter of Massachusetts, probably because the proprietor of the former colony was a Catholic, while the latter colony was offensively Puritan. But Aristopia came little under his notice. His campaign against the exiled King James in Ireland led to further measures against that unhappy country resembling those of Cromwell. Nearly the whole Irish population of the province of Ulster was driven out. Many thousands of these exiles were brought to Aristopia, where they furnished very crude but in the end very valuable material for citizenship, as we have seen in the case of those driven out by Cromwell.
By the time those were settled in Aristopia, the valley of the Ohio from its source at the junction of the Alleghany and the Monongahela to its mouth was thickly settled. At the junction just mentioned a flourishing town called Columbus was established, and became the seat of an extensive iron-smelting industry. The old trading-posts on the Ohio and the Mississippi had become large towns. New trading posts had been established far westward up the Mizouri, and northward up the Mississippi.
Lead in abundance had been discovered in the region west of the Mississippi, not far from that river, and considerable mining settlements had been formed. Zinc ore was also found in the vicinity of the lead ore.
The Indians who came to trade at the posts on the upper Mississippi had knives, hatchets, and arrow-heads cast of copper, evidently of native manufacture. Some of the Indians revealed the existence of large deposits of pure metallic copper, which they said were situated near the shores of a vast lake or fresh-water sea far to the north. These Indians were induced by rich presents to conduct an exploring party to the mines. With the party were experts in minerals and a mathematician to determine the latitude and longitude of the places visited. The party set out from a post on the Mississippi about five hundred miles (by river) above the mouth of the Mizouri and traveled nearly four hundred miles in a northerly direction, over rugged hills and broad plains, narrow prairies and extensive forests, first of hard woods and later of great pines. At last they came to the shore of a lake so vast that it seemed like a sea. Near the lake they found many outcroppings of metallic copper and copper ore, with indications that much greater quantities could he obtained by mining.
The Indians informed the explorers that another great lake lay off to the southeast of the copper mines, on which they could, by going southward, reach a point less than six days' journey from the Mississippi. It was determined that on reaching this lake a few of the party should go by canoes as far as possible, leaving the rest of the party to return by nearly the same route as they came.
Crossing the peninsula separating the two great lakes, a party of five white men, including the mathematician, and two Indian guides, embarked in birch canoes and set out southward along the shore of the great and solitary lake. After a long journey southward they found the shore of the lake trending too much to the east, when they abandoned their canoes and struck out on foot over the vast prairie, with the setting sun as their guide. In due time they reached the great river, and were soon at a trading-post.
Copper was a metal very much needed in Aristopia. Unalloyed and in brass and bronze it was far better adapted to many uses than iron, which was very plentiful in the country. There was plenty of zinc from which to make brass, but all the copper used had to be imported from Europe. So it was decided by the government of Aristopia to take possession of these copper mines, although they were far beyond the charter limits of the commonwealth.
The Elenwah River, emptying into the Mississippi about twenty-five miles above the mouth of the Mizouri, could be ascended by horse-boats to within about a hundred miles of the shore of the great Lake Michigan. At this head of navigation a post was established. A fort was built of prairie sods, and armed with three six-pound cannons. Houses were built of lumber, brought up on the boats. For the post on Lake Michigan a point was selected at the mouth of a small river called the Sheca'o. The mouth of the river would form a port for vessels used on the lake. As there was no timber for building and fuel here, a post was not immediately established; but a strong party with all the necessary tools was sent northward alongthe shore of the lake until a spot was found where there was plenty of good timber, and a small river running into the lake which would furnish water-power for a saw-mill. Here a post called Sheboygan was established, and a saw-mill erected. From the lumber sawn two sailing vessels were built. The first one, which was finished immediately, took a cargo of lumber to the mouth of the Shecago River, where a post called Shecago was established. The western and northern shores of Lake Michigan were explored with a view to finding a passage into the other lake, called Lake Tracy or Superior. It was found, however, that in the river between the two lakes were rapids which prevented navigation. So another post, called Escanaba, was established at the head of a little bay at the north end of Lake Michigan. From this point a road was cut through the woods to the shore of Lake Superior, a distance of about forty-five miles. On the shore of Lake Superior another post, called Fort Neenah, was established and another saw-mill erected. A vessel of about twenty tons was built to ply between Fort Neenah and the mines, where a post called Fort Copper was established.
In this systematic and thorough manner a line of communication was established between the western settlements of Aristopia and the far-off northern mines, which left only two short journeys overland to be made. Thus, before the end of the seventeenth century, the white sails of staunch vessels, manned by English-speaking crews, could be seen on these lonely inland seas, of whose very existence the people of England were ignorant, supposing that in their place rolled the salt waves of the great South Sea.
This extension of the outposts of Aristopia not only supplied the colony with a large amount of copper, but greatly increased its fur trade, by extending it into a new region. In this high northern latitude, too, the furs were of the best quality.
The determination which Ralph Morton took to occupy with his colony the interior instead of the coast region, with the results that flowed from that determination, effectually blocked a game which France had begun to play more than a century before the events described in this chapter, viz: the occupation of the interior of the vast continent which the English for a long time thought so narrow and of which they seized only the Atlantic coast. The fur traders of the French early pushed up the St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario, and later the ardent and courageous missionaries went much farther. Later still a French colony occupied the lower Mississippi, and the natural result would have been a final union of these colonies by the pathway of the Mississippi, Ohio, and the great lakes. But the settlements of Aristopia blocked the way.
In 1673 a party composed of Marquette, a missionary who had spent several years in the region of the great lakes, Joliet, a Quebec trader, five other Frenchmen, and two Algonquins, ascended a river flowing into Lake Michigan to a place where a short portage enabled them to launch their canoes in another broad but shallow river flowing southwestward. This river was named by the French Ouisquondsen (later spelled Ouisconsin). Here the Indian guides deserted the party, and the Frenchmen proceeded down the stream in search of a greater river of which they had heard.
After seven days of floating and paddling, they came into this great river and began to descend. They saw, indeed, a magnificent stream, its great volume in some places flowing in one broad channel, at other places dividing and running' among islands covered to the water's edge with willow and birch. The valley they saw flanked with high bluffs, in places rising in smooth, green ramparts, crowned with oak groves, in other places perpendicular limestone cliffs. Descending a hundred miles, the valley broadened out and the great bluffs sunk into low, rounded hills. The water rippled clear in the sunshine on the sandy banks, sprinkled with many-hued pebbles, for here the great river had not been polluted by the turbid tide of the Mizouri.
They had been told by the Indians that white men were settled on the banks of the great river, but they concluded that in their imperfect knowledge of the language they had misunderstood; they were sure the region had never been seen by any Europeans except themselves. Great, then, was their surprise when, after descending about two hundred and fifty miles from the mouth of the Ouisconsin, and supposing themselves in a vast solitude so far from civilization that the thought was overawing, they saw upon the eastern bank a village of about fifty houses, with outlying farms and farm-houses, all of civilized style, and a fort over which floated the well-known flag of England, and a banner bearing three bars of red, white, and blue. Going ashore, they learned that it was the outpost of the Colony of Aristopia, and was called Oquawka. The Frenchmen had heard of Aristopia, but had not supposed that its outposts were within five hundred miles of the great river. When they learned that down the river were other towns, one of which contained fifteen hundred inhabitants, Joliet said to Marquette:
"These cursed English will populate the whole earth some time."
"Meanwhile," answered Marquette, "they bar the way to the spread of the true religion of the holy cross among the heathen of this fair land."
The bright visions in which the Frenchmen had been indulging, while floating down the great river, of seeing this noble valley, with a climate so much more genial than that of the St. Lawrence, peopled with Frenchmen, vanished. They saw that France was completely forestalled. After a few days' rest, being treated very hospitably, they returned to New France as they came.
The war which broke out between France and England on the accession of William III., and lasted, with a short intermission, until 1713, into which the American colonies were dragged, had no effect on Aristopia. The French and their allies, the Algonquins, made from their posts on the St. Lawrence several bloody raids on the exposed settlements of New England and eastern New York, accompanied with great atrocities. But the powerful Iroquois, the implacable enemies of the French and the allies of the English, barred the way of the French to the west, compelling them to evacuate Forts Niagara and Frontenac, respectively, at the inlet and outlet of Lake Ontario. The Mohawks, one of the Iroquois tribes, even made a bloody raid on Montreal. The French afterward made peace with the Iroquois, but during the war had not force enough west of Niagara Falls to threaten Aristopia.