established among them with poultries and provisions of every kind, for which they had never received a dollar’s payment.  They remarked that the stores seemed to disappear in a way truly marvellous, leaving the backwoods soldiers who were to have benefited by them “as ragged as ever.”  The petitioners complained that the undisciplined militia quartered among them, who on their arrival were “in the most shabby and wretched state,” and who had “rioted in abundance and unaccustomed luxury” at the expense of the Creoles, had also maltreated and insulted them; as for instance they had at times wantonly shot the cattle merely to try their rifles.  “Ours was the task of hewing and carting them firewood to the barracks,” continued the petition, complaining of the way the Virginians had imposed on the submissiveness and docility of the inhabitants, “ours the drudgery of raising vegetables which we did not eat, poultry for their kitchen, cattle for the diversion of their marksmen.”

The petitioners further asked that every man among them should be granted five hundred acres.  They explained that formerly they had set no value on the land, occupying themselves chiefly with the Indian trade, and raising only the crops they absolutely needed for food; but that now they realized the worth of the soil, and inasmuch as they had various titles to it, under lost or forgotten charters from the French kings, they would surrender all the rights these titles conveyed, save only what belonged to the Church of Cahokia, in return for the above named grant of five hundred acres to each individual. [Footnote:  State Department MSS., No. 48, “Memorial of the French Inhabitants of Post Vincennes, Kaskaskia, La Prairie du Rocher, Cahokia, and Village of St. Philip to Congress.”  By Bartholemew Tardiveau, agent.  New York, February 26, 1788.  Tardiveau was a French mercantile adventurer, who had relations with Gardoqui and the Kentucky separatists, and in a petition presented by him it is not easy to discriminate between the views that are really those of the Creoles, and the views which he deemed it for his own advantage to have expressed.]

The memorialists alluded to their explanation of the fact that they had lost all the title-deeds to the land, that is all the old charters granted them, as “ingenuous and candid”; and so it was.  The immense importance of having lost all proof of their rights did not strike them.  There was an almost pathetic childishness in the request that the United States authorities should accept oral tradition in lieu of the testimony of the lost charters, and in the way they dwelt with a kind of humble pride upon their own “submissiveness and docility.”  In the same spirit the inhabitants of Vincennes surrendered their charter, remarking “accustomed to mediocrity, we do not wish for wealth but for mere competency.” [Footnote:  Do., July 26, 1787.] Of course the “submissiveness” and the light-heartedness of the French did not prevent their being also fickle; and their “docility” was varied by fits of violent quarrelling with their American neighbors and among themselves.  But the quarrels of the Creoles were those of children, compared with the ferocious feuds of the Americans.