Chapter 9 –
Reading and hiding
I spent the afternoon reading the three remaining diaries. At one point Margaret brought me a sandwich. I paid her and then went back to reading. I have to admit to being a little disappointed in diaries number three and four. The authors had traveled up the river multiple times, but they both seemed to be blind. One seemed obsessed with the weather, and there was a daily report on temperature and rain fall. Since there was nothing approaching our contemporary thermometers, the best he could do was classify days into hot and really hot. He thought Illinois was really hot most days.
Diary four was less a diary and more an account book used to log what he bought and sold. I copied down some of his prices to get a sense of what kind of profit these guys were making. In general, it appeared they were doubling prices as they moved from buying to selling. Given the effort they went through to acquire their merchandise, and the transportation costs, and the risk of loss through storms or thieves, I actually thought their markup was pretty modest. But other than that, I didn’t see much in the diary that helped me understand the relations between the Huguenots and the people of Illinois.
Then I started diary five and a whole new world opened up to me. The guy was a talker, and he liked to record his thoughts each day. He wasn’t a preacher, but it would not surprise me if he had preachers in his family, or politicians. He talked to people, and then wrote about it in his diary, working on various ways to interpret what he had heard. Most of his interpretations were pretty original, and often pretty wild and speculative. All that was interesting for the first thirty pages as he wrote about events in Baton Rouge, and it got more interesting when he described his trip to Kaskaskia. Nominally he was there as a purchasing agent for his family, but I doubt if they got much real purchasing out of him. He was too busy talking to every man in the town.
And here’s where I nearly jumped out of my chair. One of the men he spoke with was Louis Jolliet, grandson of the Louis Jolliet, and the year was 1754. What was their conversation about? The invasion of the Ohio Valley by Virginia militia under the command of George Washington. The diarist misspelled Virginia and Washington, but through his conversation with Jolliet, he got most of the essential information about the invasion correct. Washington had attacked first, he had been defeated, and he and his men had been driven back over the mountains. July Fourth had been a triumph for the French.
It was interesting to know that folks in Kaskaskia knew about the fight already in mid-August when the journal entry was made, and interesting to know how accurately they conveyed information from settlement to settlement. But the diarist was a talker and thinker, so he also spent nearly four pages of very expensive paper describing what Jolliet said, and what he had said in response. It wasn’t quite the dialogs of Plato, but it was a pretty extensive analysis of options and opportunities.
First, Jolliet understood Washington pretty well. This was not a raid by thirty Virginians hoping to trade illegally with the Indians and get some furs back over the mountains before they got caught. Two hundred men who took the time to pull cannons over the mountains had come to stay. This was an effort at territorial conquest.
Second, he saw right away why Washington had gone for the headwaters of the Ohio. Once they were solidly in control of that area, they could come down the Ohio at any time and take the middle out of Canada. Washington fortified at Duquesne was an existential threat to Canada.
Much as I was impressed by Jolliet, I was fascinated by the reactions of the diarist. He listened to Jolliet, and he understood the threat, but sitting in his river boat that night and writing in his diary by lamp light, it was clear he was still determining what the Washington invasion might mean to the Huguenots. Jolliet was sure Washington would try again, if not the following year, then soon thereafter. The diarist, Joseph Theire, put two and two together and came up with several versions of four. In one version the Virginians came over the mountains again, took the Ohio, and then took Louisiana. In another version, they stayed in the Ohio Valley and gave the business people of Louisiana another set of customers and a new set of suppliers. In a third version, Washington accepted help from the Huguenots and they divided the continent between themselves. The upshot was, to Thiere at least, the next steps were not all that certain. He had lots to think about and lots to discuss with his friends back home.
And… That’s where the diary ended. I had spent an hour on the edge of my seat, far too excited to eat the silly sandwich, taking notes like crazy, and then it just stopped. I turned the last page and almost screamed. This is the guy who would give me the best insight into Huguenot thinking, and he just runs out of words? Out of paper? Out of time?
I grabbed all the books and took the elevator downstairs. Margaret with still in the archives area, and she still looked, well, she still looked, well, I was in a hurry so I ignored it.
“Do you have any other diaries by Joseph Thiere?”
She turned to a computer on a nearby counter and did a quick search. “Yes, and that’s pretty unusual. We have two of his, and almost no one else has two in the collection. Either he had more access to paper than anyone else in the colony, or he was the most chatty.”
“Could I look at the other one, please?”
“No.” She was staring at the screen while she said that. “It says it was checked out, but that is crazy, since we never check out volumes form the archives. And here’s where it gets really odd. It says it was checked out by Mr. Guillard. But he never does that. He is more observant of the rules than anyone.”
“Any chance those diaries were digitized?”
“Yes. Okay, now it is starting to make sense. They were digitized and uploaded to the local historical society web site. I suppose Mr. Guillard was presenting them at a meeting. Maybe he was giving a talk or something.”
“Thank you.” I turned to go. It was already early evening. It was time to get back to my hotel.
“Shawn?” Margaret stood with her hands at her sides, looking at me. “Will you be coming back tomorrow?”
“I really don’t know. Thank you for your help.” I left the archives area, took the elevator upstairs, and was out of the building. I was a little surprised by how dark it was already getting. As excited as I was about the Thiere diary, I was also aware I was walking alone in a city where Goulet said I had a target on my back. I never broke into a run, but I walked about as fast as I have ever walked. By the time I made it back to the hotel I was covered in sweat, but I had made it.