第6章 The River and Its Explorers(2)

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 of the savages,La Salle set up a cross with the arms of France on it,and took possession of the whole country for the king--the cool fashion of the time--while the priest piously consecrated the robbery with a hymn.

The priest explained the mysteries of the faith 'by signs,'for the saving of the savages;thus compensating them with possible possessions in Heaven for the certain ones on earth which they had just been robbed of.And also,by signs,La Salle drew from these simple children of the forest acknowledgments of fealty to Louis the Putrid,over the water.

Nobody smiled at these colossal ironies.

These performances took place on the site of the future town of Napoleon,Arkansas,and there the first confiscation-cross was raised on the banks of the great river.Marquette's and Joliet's voyage of discovery ended at the same spot--the site of the future town of Napoleon.

When De Soto took his fleeting glimpse of the river,away back in the dim early days,he took it from that same spot--the site of the future town of Napoleon,Arkansas.Therefore,three out of the four memorable events connected with the discovery and exploration of the mighty river,occurred,by accident,in one and the same place.It is a most curious distinction,when one comes to look at it and think about it.

France stole that vast country on that spot,the future Napoleon;and by and by Napoleon himself was to give the country back again!--make restitution,not to the owners,but to their white American heirs.

The voyagers journeyed on,touching here and there;'passed the sites,since become historic,of Vicksburg and Grand Gulf,'and visited an imposing Indian monarch in the Teche country,whose capital city was a substantial one of sun-baked bricks mixed with straw--better houses than many that exist there now.

The chiefs house contained an audience room forty feet square;and there he received Tonty in State,surrounded by sixty old men clothed in white cloaks.There was a temple in the town,with a mud wall about it ornamented with skulls of enemies sacrificed to the sun.

The voyagers visited the Natchez Indians,near the site of the present city of that name,where they found a 'religious and political despotism,a privileged class descended from the sun,a temple and a sacred fire.'

It must have been like getting home again;it was home with an advantage,in fact,for it lacked Louis XIV.

A few more days swept swiftly by,and La Salle stood in the shadow of his confiscating cross,at the meeting of the waters from Delaware,and from Itaska,and from the mountain ranges close upon the Pacific,with the waters of the Gulf of Mexico,his task finished,his prodigy achieved.

Mr.Parkman,in closing his fascinating narrative,thus sums up:'On that day,the realm of France received on parchment a stupendous accession.The fertile plains of Texas;the vast basin of the Mississippi,from its frozen northern springs to the sultry borders of the Gulf;from the woody ridges of the Alleghanies to the bare peaks of the Rocky Mountains--a region of savannas and forests,sun-cracked deserts and grassy prairies,watered by a thousand rivers,ranged by a thousand warlike tribes,passed beneath the scepter of the Sultan of Versailles;and all by virtue of a feeble human voice,inaudible at half a mile.'