Life on the Mississippi | Page 4

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; and
reasonably enough, for he had been warned by the Indians that he was
on a foolhardy journey, and even a fatal one, for the river contained a
demon 'whose roar could be heard at a great distance, and who would
engulf them in the abyss where he dwelt.' I have seen a Mississippi cat-
fish that was more than six feet long, and weighed two hundred and
fifty pounds; and if Marquette's fish was the fellow to that one, he had a
fair right to think the river's roaring demon was come.
'At length the buffalo began to appear, grazing in herds on the great
prairies which then bordered the river; and Marquette describes the
fierce and stupid look of the old bulls as they stared at the intruders
through the tangled mane which nearly blinded them.'
The voyagers