for each other.
For more than a hundred and fifty years there had been white
settlements on our Atlantic coasts. These people were in intimate
communication with the Indians: in the south the Spaniards
were robbing, slaughtering, enslaving and converting them;
higher up, the English were trading beads and blankets to them
for a consideration, and throwing in civilization and whiskey,
‘for lagniappe;’ and in Canada the French were schooling them
in a rudimentary way, missionarying among them, and drawing whole
populations of them at a time to Quebec, and later to Montreal,
to buy furs of them. Necessarily, then, these various clusters
of whites must have heard of the great river of the far west;
and indeed, they did hear of it vaguely,–so vaguely and indefinitely,
that its course, proportions, and locality were hardly even guessable.
The mere mysteriousness of the matter ought to have fired
curiosity and compelled exploration; but this did not occur.
Apparently nobody happened to want such a river, nobody needed it,
nobody was curious about it; so, for a century and a half
the Mississippi remained out of the market and undisturbed.
When De Soto found it, he was not hunting for a river, and had
no present occasion for one; consequently he did not value it
or even take any particular notice of it.
But at last La Salle the Frenchman conceived the idea of
seeking out that river and exploring it. It always happens
that when a man seizes upon a neglected and important idea,
people inflamed with the same notion crop up all around.
It happened so in this instance.
Naturally the question suggests itself, Why did these people want the river
now when nobody had wanted it in the five preceding generations?
Apparently it was because at this late day they thought they
had discovered a way to make it useful; for it had come to be
believed that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California,
and therefore afforded a short cut from Canada to China.
Previously the supposition had been that it emptied into the Atlantic,
or Sea of Virginia.
Chapter 2
The River and Its Explorers
LA SALLE himself sued for certain high privileges, and they
were graciously accorded him by Louis XIV of inflated memory.
Chief among them was the privilege to explore, far and wide,
and build forts, and stake out continents, and hand the same over
to the king, and pay the expenses himself; receiving, in return,
some little advantages of one sort or another; among them
the monopoly of buffalo hides. He spent several years and
about all of his money, in making perilous and painful trips
between Montreal and a fort which he had built on the Illinois,
before he at last succeeded in getting his expedition in such
a shape that he could strike for the Mississippi.
And meantime other parties had had better fortune.
In 1673 Joliet the merchant, and Marquette the priest,
crossed the country and reached the banks of the Mississippi.
They went by way of the Great Lakes; and from Green Bay,
in canoes, by way of Fox River and the Wisconsin. Marquette had
solemnly contracted, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception,
that if the Virgin would permit him to discover the great river,
he would name it Conception, in her honor. He kept his word.
In that day, all explorers traveled with an outfit of priests.
De Soto had twenty-four with him. La Salle had several, also.
The expeditions were often out of meat, and scant of clothes,
but they always had the furniture and other requisites for the mass;
they were always prepared, as one of the quaint chroniclers of the time
phrased it, to ‘explain hell to the savages.’
On the 17th of June, 1673, the canoes of Joliet and Marquette and their five
subordinates reached the junction of the Wisconsin with the Mississippi.
Mr. Parkman says: ‘Before them a wide and rapid current coursed athwart
their way, by the foot of lofty heights wrapped thick in forests.’
He continues: ‘Turning southward, they paddled down the stream, through a
solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of man.’
A big cat-fish collided with Marquette’s canoe, and startled him;