Part 8

The affair had now come to a focus. It was fight, or yield and be treated as a traitor. Bacon resolved to fight, and he found many to back him in it, for he soon had a force collected. How many there were we do not know. Some say only one hundred and fifty, some say eight hundred; but however that be, he marched with them on Jamestown, bringing his Indian captives with him. Rebels and Royalists the two parties were now called; people and tyrant would have been better titles, for Bacon was in arms for the public right and had the people at his back.

The old governor was ready. While in Accomac he had taken and hung two friends of Bacon, who had gone there to try and capture him. He asked for nothing better than the chance to serve Bacon in the same way. His ships, armed with cannon, now lay in the river near the town. A palisade, ten paces wide, had been built across the neck of the peninsula in which Jamestown stood. Behind it lay a strong body of armed men. Berkeley felt that he had the best of the situation, and was defiant of his foes.

It was at the end of a September day when Bacon and his small army of "rebels" arrived. Springing from his horse, he led the tired men up to the palisades and surveyed the governor's works of defence. Then he ordered his trumpeter to sound defiance and his men to fire on the garrison. There was no return fire. Sir William knew that the assailants were short of provisions, and trusted to hunger to make them retire. But Bacon was versed in the art of foraging. At Green Spring, three miles away, was Governor Berkeley's fine mansion, and from this the invading army quickly supplied itself. The governor afterwards bitterly complained that his mansion "was almost ruined; his household goods, and others of great value, totally plundered; that he had not a bed to lie on; two great beasts, three hundred sheep, seventy horses and mares, all his corn and provisions, taken away." Evidently the "rebels" knew something about the art of war.

This was not all, for their leader adopted another stratagem not well in accordance with the rules of chivalry. A number of the loyalists of the vicinity had joined Berkeley, and Bacon sent out small parties of horse, which captured the wives of these men and brought them into camp. Among them were the lady of Colonel Bacon, Madame Bray, Madame Page, and Madame Ballard. He sent one of these ladies to the town, with a warning to the husbands not to attack him in his camp, or they would find their wives in front of his line.

What Bacon actually wanted these ladies for was to make use of them in building his works. He raised by moonlight a defensive work of trees, brushwood and earth around the governor's outwork of palisades, placing the ladies in front of the workmen to keep the garrison from firing on them. But he had the chivalry to take them out of harm's way when the governor's men made a sortie on his camp.

The fight that took place may have been a hard one or a light one. We have no very full account of it. The most we know is that Bacon and his men won the victory, and that the governor's men were driven back, leaving their drum and their dead behind them. Whether hard or light, his repulse was enough for Sir William's valor. Well intrenched as he was and superior in numbers, his courage suddenly gave out, and he fled in haste to his ships, which set sail in equal haste down the river, their speed accelerated by the cannon-balls which the "rebels" sent after them.

Once more the doughty governor was a fugitive, and Bacon was master of the situation. Jamestown, the original Virginia settlement, was in his hands. What should he do with it? He could not stay there, for he knew that Colonel Brent, with some twelve hundred men, was marching down on him from the Potomac. He did not care to leave it for Berkeley to return to. In this dilemma he concluded to burn it. To this none of his men made any objection. Two of them, indeed, Lawrence and Drummond, who had houses in the place, set fire to them with their own hands. And thus the famous old town of John Smith and the early settlers was burned to the ground. Old as it was, we are told that it contained only a church and sixteen or eighteen houses, and in some of these there were no families. To-day nothing but the ruined church tower remains.

Bacon now marched north to York River to meet Colonel Brent and his men. But by the time he got there the men had dispersed. The news of the affair at Jamestown had reached them, and they concluded they did not want to fight. Bacon was now master of Virginia, with the power though not the name of governor.

What would have come of his movement had he lived it is impossible to say, for in the hour of his triumph a more perilous foe than Sir William Berkeley was near at hand. While directing his men in their work at the Jamestown trenches a fever had attacked him, and this led to a dangerous dysentery which carried him off after a few weeks' illness. His death was a terrible blow to his followers, for the whole movement rested on the courage and ability as a leader of this one man. They even feared the vindictive Berkeley would attempt some outrage upon the remains of the "rebel" leader, and they buried his body at night in a secret place. Some traditions assert that he was dealt with as De Soto had been before him, his body being sunk in the bosom of the majestic York River, where it was left with the winds and the waves to chant its requiem.

Thus ended what Sir William Berkeley called the "Great Rebellion." Its leader dead, there was none to take his place. In despair the men returned to their homes. Many of them made their way to North Carolina, in which new colony they were warmly welcomed. A few kept up a show of resistance, but they were soon dispersed, and Berkeley came back in triumph, his heart full of revengeful passion. He had sent to England for troops, and the arrival of these gave him support in his cruel designs.

All the leading friends of Bacon whom he could seize were mercilessly put to death, some of them with coarse and aggravating insults. The wife of Major Cheeseman, one of the prisoners, knelt at the governor's feet and pitifully pleaded for her husband's life, but all she got in return from the old brute was a vulgar insult. The major escaped the gallows only by dying in prison.

One of the most important of the prisoners was William Drummond, a close friend of Bacon. Berkeley hated him and greeted him with the most stinging insult he could think of.

"Mr. Drummond," said he, with a bitter sneer, "you are very welcome; I am more glad to see you than any man in Virginia. Mr. Drummond, you shall be hanged in half an hour."

And he was. His property was also seized, but when the king heard of this he ordered it to be restored to his widow.

"God has been inexpressibly merciful to this poor province," wrote Berkeley, with sickening hypocrisy, after one of his hangings. Charles II., the king, took a different view of the matter, saying: "That old fool has hung more men in that naked province than I did for the murder of my father." More than twenty of Bacon's chief supporters were hung, and the governor's revenge came to an end only when the assembly met and insisted that these executions should cease.

We have told how Bacon came to his end. We must do the same for Berkeley, his foe. Finding that he was hated and despised in Virginia, he sailed for England, many of the people celebrating his departure by firing cannon and illuminating their houses. He never returned. The king was so angry with him that he refused to see him; a slight which affected the old man so severely that he soon died, of a broken heart, it is said. Thus ended the first rebellion of the people of the American colonies.

CHEVALIER LA SALLE, THE EXPLORER OF THE MISSISSIPPI.

There are two great explorers whose names have been made famous by their association with the mighty river of the West, the Mississippi, or Father of Waters,--De Soto, the discoverer, and La Salle, the explorer, of that stupendous stream. Among all the rivers of the earth the Mississippi ranks first. It has its rivals in length and volume, but stands without a rival as a noble channel of commerce, the pride of the West and the glory of the South. We have told the story of its discovery by De Soto, the Spanish adventurer; we have now to tell that of its exploration by La Salle, the French chevalier.

Let us say here that though the honor of exploring the Mississippi has been given to La Salle, he was not the first to traverse its waters. The followers of De Soto descended the stream from the Arkansas to its mouth in 1542. Father Marquette and Joliet, the explorer, descended from the Wisconsin to the Arkansas in 1673. In 1680 Father Hennepin, a Jesuit missionary sent by La Salle, ascended the stream from the Illinois to the Falls of St. Anthony. Thus white men had followed the great river for nearly its whole length. But the greatest of all these explorers and the first to traverse the river for the greater part of its course, was the Chevalier Robert de la Salle, and to his name is given the glory of revealing this grand stream to mankind.

Never was there a more daring and indefatigable explorer than Robert de la Salle. He seemed born to make new lands and new people known to the world. Coming to Canada in 1667, he began his career by engaging in the fur trade on Lake Ontario. But he could not rest while the great interior remained unknown. In 1669 he made an expedition to the west and south, and was the first white man to gaze on the waters of the swift Ohio. In 1679 he launched on the Great Lakes the first vessel that ever spread its sails on those mighty inland seas, and in this vessel, the Griffin, he sailed through Lakes Erie, Huron, and Michigan.

La Salle next descended the Illinois River, and built a fort where the city of Peoria now stands. But his vessel was wrecked, and he was forced to make his way on foot through a thousand miles of wilderness to obtain supplies at Montreal. Such was the early record of this remarkable man, and for two years afterward his life was full of adventure and misfortune. At length, in 1682, he entered upon the great performance of his life, his famous journey upon the bosom of the Father of Waters.

It was midwinter when La Salle and his men set out from the lakes with their canoes. On the 4th of January, 1682, they reached the mouth of the Chicago River, where its waters enter Lake Michigan. The river was frozen hard, and they had to build sledges to drag their large and heavy canoes down the ice-closed stream. Reaching the portage to the Illinois, they continued their journey across the bleak and snowy waste, toilsomely dragging canoes, baggage, and provisions to the other stream. Here, too, they found a sheet of ice, and for some days longer trudged down the channel of the silent and dreary stream. Its banks had been desolated by Indian wars, and where once many flourishing villages rose there were to be seen only ashes and smoke-blackened ruins.

About the 1st of February they reached Crevecoeur, the fort La Salle had built some years earlier. Below this point the stream was free from ice, and after a week's rest the canoes were launched on the liquid surface. They were not long in reaching the point where the Illinois buries its waters in the mighty main river, the grave of so many broad and splendid streams.

Past the point they had now reached the Mississippi poured swiftly downward, its waters swollen, and bearing upon them great sheets of ice, the contribution of the distant north. It was no safe channel for their frail birch-bark canoes, and they were obliged to wait a week till the vast freightage of ice had run past. Then, on the 13th of February, 1682, they launched their canoes on the great stream, and began their famous voyage down its mighty course.

A day's journey brought them to the place where the turbulent Missouri pours its contribution, gathered from thousands of miles of mountain and prairie, into the parent stream, rushing with the force and roar of a rapid through a channel half a mile broad, and quickly converting the clear Mississippi waters into a turbid yellow torrent, thick with mud.

La Salle, like so many of the early explorers, was full of the idea of finding a short route across the continent to the Pacific Ocean, and he found the Indians at the mouth of the Missouri ready to tell him anything he wanted to know. They said that by sailing ten or twelve days up the stream, through populous villages of their people, he would come to a range of mountains in which the river rose; and by climbing to the summit of these lofty hills he could gaze upon a vast and boundless sea, whose waves broke on their farther side. It was one of those imaginative stories which the Indians were always ready to tell, and the whites as ready to believe, and it was well for La Salle that he did not attempt the fanciful adventure.

Savage settlements were numerous along the Mississippi, as De Soto had found a century and more earlier. About thirty miles below the Missouri they came to another village of peaceful natives, whose souls they made happy by a few trifling gifts which were of priceless worth to their untutored minds. Then downward still they went for a hundred miles or more farther, to the mouth of another great stream, this one flowing from the east, and as noble in its milder way as the Missouri had been in its turbulent flow. Unlike the latter, this stream was gentle in its current, and its waters were of crystal clearness. It was the splendid river which the Indians called the Wabash, or Beautiful River, and the French by the similar name of La Belle Rivière. It is now known as the Ohio, the Indian name being transferred to one of its tributaries. This was the stream on whose waters La Salle had gazed with admiration thirteen years before.

The voyagers were obliged to proceed slowly. Unable to carry many provisions in their crowded canoes, they were often forced to stop and fish or hunt for game. As the Indians told them they would find no good camping-grounds for many miles below the Ohio, they stopped for ten days at its mouth, hunting and gathering supplies. Parties were sent out to explore in various directions, and one of the men, Peter Prudhomme, failed to return. It was feared that he had been taken captive by the Indians, traces of whom had been seen near by, and a party of Frenchmen, with Indian guides, was sent out on the trails of the natives. They returned without the lost man, and La Salle, at length, reluctantly giving him up, prepared to continue the journey. Just as they were entering the canoes the missing man reappeared. For nine days he had been lost in the forest, vainly seeking his friends, and wandering hopelessly. His gun, however, had provided him with food, and he reached the stream just in time.