第4章 The River and Its History(3)

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 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.