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 catfish 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.
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.’