Life on the Mississippi | Page 3

realization, of the stretch of time which they represent.
To say that De Soto, the first white man who ever saw the Mississippi
River, saw it in 1542, is a remark which states a fact without
interpreting it: it is something like giving the dimensions of a sunset by
astronomical measurements, and cataloguing the colors by their
scientific names;--as a result, you get the bald fact of the sunset, but
you don't see the sunset. It would have been better to paint a picture of
it.

The date 1542, standing by itself, means little or nothing to us; but
when one groups a few neighboring historical dates and facts around it,
he adds perspective and color, and then realizes that this is one of the
American dates which is quite respectable for age.
For instance, when the Mississippi was first seen by a white man, less
than a quarter of a century had elapsed since Francis I.'s defeat at Pavia;
the death of Raphael; the death of Bayard, SANS PEUR ET SANS
REPROCHE; the driving out of the Knights-Hospitallers from Rhodes
by the Turks; and the placarding of the Ninety-Five Propositions,--the
act which began the Reformation. When De Soto took his glimpse of
the river, Ignatius Loyola was an obscure name; the order of the Jesuits
was not yet a year old; Michael Angelo's paint was not yet dry on the
Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel; Mary Queen of Scots was not yet
born, but would be before the year closed. Catherine de Medici was a
child; Elizabeth of England was not yet in her teens; Calvin, Benvenuto
Cellini, and the Emperor Charles V. were at the top of their fame, and
each was manufacturing history after his own peculiar fashion;
Margaret of Navarre was writing the 'Heptameron' and some religious
books,--the first survives, the others are forgotten, wit and indelicacy
being sometimes better literature preservers than holiness; lax court
morals and the absurd chivalry business were in full feather, and the
joust and the tournament were the frequent pastime of titled fine
gentlemen who could fight better than they could spell, while religion
was the passion of their ladies, and classifying their offspring into
children of full rank and children by brevet their pastime. In fact, all
around, religion was in a peculiarly blooming condition: the Council of
Trent was being called; the Spanish Inquisition was roasting, and
racking, and burning, with a free hand; elsewhere on the continent the
nations were being persuaded to holy living by the sword and fire; in
England, Henry VIII. had suppressed the monasteries, burnt Fisher and
another bishop or two, and was getting his English reformation and his
harem effectively started. When De Soto stood on the banks of the
Mississippi, it was still two years before Luther's death; eleven years
before the burning of Servetus; thirty years before the St. Bartholomew
slaughter; Rabelais was not yet published; 'Don Quixote' was not yet
written; Shakespeare was not yet born; a hundred long years must still
elapse before Englishmen would hear the name of Oliver Cromwell.

Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable fact which
considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our country,
and gives her a most respectable outside-aspect of rustiness and
antiquity.
De Soto merely glimpsed the river, then died and was buried in it by
his priests and soldiers. One would expect the priests and the soldiers to
multiply the river's dimensions by ten--the Spanish custom of the day--
and thus move other adventurers to go at once and explore it. On the
contrary, their narratives when they reached home, did not excite that
amount of curiosity. The Mississippi was left unvisited by whites
during a term of years which seems incredible in our energetic days.
One may 'sense' the interval to his mind, after a fashion, by dividing it
up in this way: After De Soto glimpsed the river, a fraction short of a
quarter of a century elapsed, and then Shakespeare was born; lived a
trifle more than half a century, then died; and when he had been in his
grave considerably more than half a century, the SECOND white man
saw the Mississippi. In our day we don't allow a hundred and thirty
years to elapse between glimpses of a marvel. If somebody should
discover a creek in the county next to the one that the North Pole is in,
Europe and America would start fifteen costly expeditions thither: one
to explore the creek, and the other fourteen to hunt 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