Life on the Mississippi | Page 5

moved cautiously: 'Landed at night and made a fire to
cook their evening meal; then extinguished it, embarked again, paddled
some way farther, and anchored in the stream, keeping a man on the
watch till morning.'
They did this day after day and night after night; and at the end of two
weeks they had not seen a human being. The river was an awful
solitude, then. And it is now, over most of its stretch.
But at the close of the fortnight they one day came upon the footprints
of men in the mud of the western bank--a Robinson Crusoe experience
which carries an electric shiver with it yet, when one stumbles on it in
print. They had been warned that the river Indians were as ferocious
and pitiless as the river demon, and destroyed all comers without
waiting for provocation; but no matter, Joliet and Marquette struck into

the country to hunt up the proprietors of the tracks. They found them,
by and by, and were hospitably received and well treated--if to be
received by an Indian chief who has taken off his last rag in order to
appear at his level best is to be received hospitably; and if to be treated
abundantly to fish, porridge, and other game, including dog, and have
these things forked into one's mouth by the ungloved fingers of Indians
is to be well treated. In the morning the chief and six hundred of his
tribesmen escorted the Frenchmen to the river and bade them a friendly
farewell.
On the rocks above the present city of Alton they found some rude and
fantastic Indian paintings, which they describe. A short distance below
'a torrent of yellow mud rushed furiously athwart the calm blue current
of the Mississippi, boiling and surging and sweeping in its course logs,
branches, and uprooted trees.' This was the mouth of the Missouri, 'that
savage river,' which 'descending from its mad career through a vast
unknown of barbarism, poured its turbid floods into the bosom of its
gentle sister.'
By and by they passed the mouth of the Ohio; they passed cane-brakes;
they fought mosquitoes; they floated along, day after day, through the
deep silence and loneliness of the river, drowsing in the scant shade of
makeshift awnings, and broiling with the heat; they encountered and
exchanged civilities with another party of Indians; and at last they
reached the mouth of the Arkansas (about a month out from their
starting-point), where a tribe of war-whooping savages swarmed out to
meet and murder them; but they appealed to the Virgin for help; so in
place of a fight there was a feast, and plenty of pleasant palaver and
fol-de-rol.
They had proved to their satisfaction, that the Mississippi did not empty
into the Gulf of California, or into the Atlantic. They believed it
emptied into the Gulf of Mexico. They turned back, now, and carried
their great news to Canada.
But belief is not proof. It was reserved for La Salle to furnish the proof.
He was provokingly delayed, by one misfortune after another, but at
last got his expedition under way at the end of the year 1681. In the
dead of winter he and Henri de Tonty, son of Lorenzo Tonty, who
invented the tontine, his lieutenant, started down the Illinois, with a
following of eighteen Indians brought from New England, and

twenty-three Frenchmen. They moved in procession down the surface
of the frozen river, on foot, and dragging their canoes after them on
sledges.
At Peoria Lake they struck open water, and paddled thence to the
Mississippi and turned their prows southward. They plowed through
the fields of floating ice, past the mouth of the Missouri; past the mouth
of the Ohio, by-and-by; 'and, gliding by the wastes of bordering swamp,
landed on the 24th of February near the Third Chickasaw Bluffs,' where
they halted and built Fort Prudhomme.
'Again,' says Mr. Parkman, 'they embarked; and with every stage of
their adventurous progress, the mystery of this vast new world was
more and more unveiled. More and more they entered the realms of
spring. The hazy sunlight, the warm and drowsy air, the tender foliage,
the opening flowers, betokened the reviving life of nature.'
Day by day they floated down the great bends, in the shadow of the
dense forests, and in time arrived at the mouth of the Arkansas. First,
they were greeted by the natives of this locality as Marquette had
before been greeted by them--with the booming of the war drum and
the flourish of arms. The Virgin composed the difficulty in Marquette's
case; the pipe of peace did the same office for La Salle. The white man
and the red man struck hands and entertained each other during three
days. Then, to the admiration