CHAPTER 2

The River and Its Explorers

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

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.

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.'