" [Footnote: See Edward G. Mason, "Old Fort Chartres," in his
"Chapters from Illinois History," 1901.] But in time the Indians, stirred
by the English rivalry, swarmed as well as mosquitoes about the place, and
there were battles, the echoes of which are still heard, we are told, in
the regions south of St. Louis even in Our days. A young French officer,
the Chevalier d'Artaguette, captured by the Chickasaws, was burned at the
stake. He and his kin were loved by all the French and the song they used
to sing of him is kept in a negro melody whose "oft-repeated chorus" ran:
"In the days of D'Artaguette,
He! Ho! He!
It was the good old time.
The world was led straight with a switch,
He! Ho! He!
Then there were no negroes, no ribbons,
No diamonds
For the vulgar.
He! Ho! He!"
And here even in this remote place premonitions of the great and imminent
struggle with the English are ominously heard. We hear the governor-
general of Canada, the Marquis de la Galissonniere, asking the home
government in France not to leave the little colony of Illinois to perish
--not for its own sake, but "else Canada and Louisiana would fall apart";
still urging, moreover, the value for fabrics of the wool of buffaloes,
which roam the prairies in innumerable multitudes, the readiness of the
earth for the plough, and the availability of the buffalo as a domestic
animal.
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