Not a day passed but the Illinois followed with inquisitive eyes the movements of the men at the fort. They watched the great white beams by the river bank as the Frenchmen laid them out and fastened them together till the growing ship began to look like the white skeleton of an immense buffalo lying bleached and bare to the four winds of heaven.

Omawha, the friendly chief, adopted as a son the short young friar of La Salle’s party; and so the gray robe of Father Membré passed freely in and out of the lodges of the village. Like one of the chief’s family, he ate of the Indian fare and slept on buffalo robes beside smouldering lodge-fires. His fellow-whites were at the new fort; and he alone watched the coming of spring in the Indian town.

As winter began to break up, the hunting parties came home. The war party from the South brought captives with them, and the village became more populous. But Chassagoac, the indefatigable hunter, was still off in the woods.

Even in the long stretches of the Indian country, winterlocked and drear, news traveled fast; and the Illinois well knew that runners were carrying all up and down the Great Valley tales of the white men among the Peorias, of the fort on the hill, and of the ship that was to sail down the long river. It was, therefore, with concern that the Peorias saw one day a gathering of Indians encamped about the fort. They were Osages and Chickasaws and Arkansas—tribes that lived along the Mississippi far to the south. And the villagers knew that they—jealous of the advantages of the Illinois—would tell the white chief of the easy navigation of the river and urge him to come down and live in their country.

Not many days passed before another group of Indians arrived, this time from the Far West—so far beyond the Mississippi River that they told of long-haired Spaniards who rode to war on horses and fought with lances. One of the Indians proudly wore at his belt a tobacco pouch made from the hoof of a horse with some of the skin of the leg attached. A week later came still another delegation to see the far-famed whites. They were Sioux from the distant Northwest, in the land where the Mississippi took its rise; and they were long-time foes of the tribes of the Illinois.

In the councils of the Illinois Indians there was much debate. Each chief had his own opinion. It was a time of new and strange happenings. Long had the Illinois tribe lived proud and comfortable in the valley. They had hunted and fished up and down the rivers at their will. In the open spaces before their arbor-like lodges they gambled and smoked and basked in the summer days, the bright sun warming their naked bodies. And when they were tired of basking, they put on their garments of red and black paint, gathered howling in the war dance, and set out on a raid against the Sacs and Foxes west of the Lake of the Illinois, or the Sioux by the headwaters of the Mississippi, or the Osages and Arkansas and other tribes on its southern banks. Often, too, war came to them, and sometimes so desperate that even the Indian women fought hand to hand with the enemy in the spaces between the lodges of the village.

But of late years had come new dangers. Faint whisperings reached them of white-faced men who brought from across the sea weapons that roared like the thunder and smote their victims like bolts of lightning. Their ancient enemies, the Iroquois, bought these weapons with furs and carried their ravages upon the Western tribes with increased deadliness. Then they learned that the white men themselves were beginning to appear on the Great Lakes—first at the eastern end, but finally on the shores of Lake Superior and the Lake of the Illinois.

By and by there pushed out from the Lakes into the valleys of the Wisconsin and the Illinois, and even as far as the Upper Mississippi, the black-robed priest and the lone fur trader. Restless coureurs de bois floated down the rivers in greater numbers. They set up cabins and wintered in the lands which once the Indians alone knew. Priests, having come to visit, came again to stay. Soldiers and explorers pierced the far wilderness. Strange canoes shot up and down the waters. The ringing of axes sounded in the woods, and forts sprang up. These new bold habitants brought hatchets that put the ol............