Four Months in a Sneak-Box | Page 9

as flatboat-men have
informed me, that their boats are carried by the flow of the stream only ten miles in a day.
The most shallow portion of the river is between Troy and Evansville. Troy is twelve
miles below the historic Blennerhasset's Island, which lies between the states of Ohio and
Virginia. Here the water sometimes shoals to a depth of only two feet.
Robert Cavelier de la Salle is credited with having made the discovery of the Ohio River.
From the St. Lawrence country he went to Onondaga, and reaching a tributary of the
Ohio River, he descended the great stream to the "Fa1ls," at Louisville, Kentucky. His

men having deserted him, he returned alone to Lake Erie. This exploration of the Ohio
was made in the winter of 1669-70, or in the following spring.
The director of the Dpt des Cartes of the Marine and Colonies, at Paris, in 1872 possessed
a rich mass of historical documents, the collection of which had covered thirty years of
his life. This material related chiefly to the French rule in North America, and its owner
had offered to dispose of it to the French government on condition that the entire
collection should be published. The French government was, however, only willing to
publish parts of the whole, and the director retained possession of his property. Through
the efforts of Mr. Francis Parkman, the truthful American historian, supported by friends,
an appropriation was made by Congress, in 1873, for the purchase and publication of this
valuable collection of the French director; and it is now the property of the United States
government. All that relates to the Sieur de la Salle--his journals and letters--has been
published in the original French, in three large volumes of six hundred pages each. La
Salle discovered the Ohio, yet the possession of the rich historical matter referred to
throws but little light upon the details of this important event. The discoverer- -of the
great west, in an address to Frontenac, the governor of Canada, made in 1677, asserted
that he had discovered the Ohio, and had descended it to a fall which obstructed it. This
locality is now known as the "Falls of the Ohio," at Louisville, Kentucky.
The second manuscript map of Galine'e, made about the year 1672, has upon it this
inscription: "River Ohio, so called by the Iroquois on account of its beauty, which the
Sieur de la Salle descended." It was probably the interpretation of the Iroquois word Ohio
which caused the French frequently to designate this noble stream as "La belle rivire."
A little later the missionary Marquette designed a map, upon which he calls the Ohio the
"Ouabouskiaou." Louis Joliet's first map gives the Ohio without a name, but supplies its
place with an inscription stating that La Salle had descended it. In Joliet's second map he
calls the Ohio "Ouboustikou."
After the missionaries and other explorers had given to the world the knowledge
possessed at that early day of the great west, a young and talented engineer of the French
government, living in Quebec, and named Jean Baptiste Louis Franquelin, completed, in
1684, the most elaborate map of the times, a carefully traced copy of which, through the
courtesy of Mr. Francis Parkman, I have been allowed to examine. The original map of
Franquelin has recently disappeared, and is supposed to have been destroyed. This map is
described in the appendix to Mr. Parkman's "Discovery of the Great West," as being "six
feet long and four and a half wide." On it, the Ohio is called "Fleuve St. Louis, ou
Chucagoa, ou Casquinampogamou;" but the appellation of "River St. Louis" was dropped
very soon after the appearance of Franquelin's map, and to the present time it justly
retains the Iroquois name given it by its brave discoverer La Salle.
It would be interesting to know by which of the routes used by the Indians in those early
days La Salle travelled to the Ohio. After the existence of the Ohio was made known, the
first route made use of in reaching that river by the coureurs de bois and other French
travellers from Canada, was that from the southern shore of Lake Erie, from a point near
where the town of Westfield now stands, across the wilderness by portage southward

about nine miles to Chautaugue Lake. These parties used light bark canoes, which were
easily carried upon the shoulders of men whenever a "carry" between the two streams
became necessary. The canoes were paddled on the lake to its southern end, out of which
flowed a shallow brook, which afforded water enough in places to float the frail craft.
The shoal water, and the obstructions made by fallen trees, necessitated frequent portages.
This wild and tortuous stream led the voyagers to