第5章 The River and Its Explorers(1)

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 1673Joliet 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 salvages.'

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 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.