To the red barbarian tribes, of which Parkman says there were a thousand, the river which passed through their valley was the "Mississippi," that is, the Great Water. They must have named it so under the compulsion of the awe in which they stood of some parts of it, and not from any knowledge of its length. They must have been impressed, especially they of the lower valley, as is the white man of to-day, by the "overwhelming, unbending grandeur of the wonderful spirit ruling the flow of the sands, the lumping of the banks, the unceasing shifting of the channel and the send of the mighty flood." No one tribe knew both its fountains and its delta, its sources and its mouth. To those midway of the valley it came out of the mystery of the Land of Frosts and passed silently on, or, in places, complainingly on, to the mystery of the Land of the Sun, into neither of which dared they penetrate because of hostile tribes. While the red men of the Mississippi lowlands were not able as the "swamp angel" of to-day to discern the rising of its Red River tributary by the reddish tinge of the water in his particular bayou, or to measure by changing hues, now the impulses of the Wisconsin or of the Ohio, and now of the richer-silted blood of the Rockies (as Mr. Raymond S. Spears, writing of the river, has graphically described),* yet as they gazed with wonderment at these changes of color, they must have had inward visions of hills of red, green, and blue earth somewhere above their own lodges or hunting-grounds, and must even have had at times some tangible message of their brothers of the upper waters, some fragments of their handiwork, such as a broken canoe, an arrow-shaft. But the men of the sources, up toward the "swamps of the nests of the eagles," on the low watersheds, heard only vague reports of the sea or gulf; even the Indians of Arkansas, as we read in the account of the De Soto expedition, could or would "give no account of the sea, and had no word in their language, or idea or emblem, that could make them comprehend a great expanse of salt water like the ocean."

(* "The Moods of the Mississippi," in Atlantic Monthly, 102:378-382. See also his "Camping on a Great River," New York, Harper, 1912, and numerous magazine articles.)

So the river was not the source or father of running waters, but the great, awe-inspiring water. The French were misled, as we have seen, when they first heard Indian references to it, thinking it was what they were longing for--the western ocean, a great stretch of salt water instead of another and a larger Seine. And when they did discover that it was a river, their first concern was not as to what lay along its course, but as to where it led.

A prominent American historian, to whom we are much indebted, with Parkman, for the memorials of this period, praises by contrast those who kept within smell of tide-water along the Atlantic shore. But when we reach the underlying motives of the exploration and settlement of that continent, do they who sought the sources and the paths to the smell of other tide-waters deserve dispraise or less praise than those who sat thriftily by the Atlantic seashore?

The English colonists were struggling for themselves and theirs, not for the good or glory of a country across seas. They had no reason to look beyond their short rivers, so long as their valleys were fruitful and ample. Shall they be praised the more that they did not for a century venture beyond the sources of those streams? The first French followers of the river courses were, as we have seen, devotees of a religion for the salvation of others, bearers of advancing banners for the glory of France, and lovers of nature and adventure. And if there were, as there were, avaricious men among them, we must be careful not to blame them more than those whose avarice or excessive thrift was economically more beneficial to the world and to the community and the colony and to themselves. Economic values and moral virtues, as expressed in productivity of fields, mines, factories, church attendance, and obedience to the selectmen, are so easy of assessment that it is difficult to get just appraisement for those who endured everything, not for their own freedom or gain but for others' glory, and accomplished so little that could be measured in the terms of substantial, visible, tangible, economic, or ecclesiastical progress.

Who first of Europeans looked upon this river at the gulf we do not know, but on a Ptolemy map, published in Venice in 1513, it is thought by some that the delta is traced with distinctness, as less distinctly in Waldseemuller's map of 1507. Five years later (1518) on Garay's map of Alvarez de Pineda's explorations, there descends into the gulf a sourceless river, the Rio del Espiritu Santo, which is thought by some to be the same river that Marquette's map showed under the name de la Conception, ending its course in the midst of the continent; but it is more generally thought now to be the Mobile River, and the Gulf del Espiritu Santo to be the Bay of Mobile. Narvaez, as I have said, tried a score of years after to enter the Mississippi, but he was carried out to sea in his flimsy improvised craft, by its resisting current. Cabeca de Vaca may have seen it again after he left Narvaez, but we have no record in his narrative that distinguishes it from any other river. Then came the accredited discoverer De Soto, who found it but another obstacle in his gold-seeking path toward the Ozarks and who found it his grave on his harassed, disappointed journey back toward Florida.

It was more than a hundred years after "it pleased God that the flood should rise," as the chronicle has it, and carry the brigantines built by De Soto's lieutenant, Moscoso, with his emaciated followers "down the Great River to the opening gulf," before another white face looked upon this great water. It was in 1543 that Moscoso and his men disappeared, sped on their voyage by the arrows of the aborigines. It was a June day in 1673 that Marquette and Joliet, coming down the Wisconsin from Green Bay, saw before them, "avec une joye que je ne peux pas expliquer," the slow, gentle-currented Mississippi; or, as Mark Twain has measured the time in a chronology of his own: "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 a 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."*

(* "Life on the Mississippi," Hillcrest edition, pp. 19, 20.)

In 1682 La Salle followed it to where it meets the great gulf, possessing with emblems of empire and his indomitable spirit the lower reaches of the stream whose upper waters had first been touched by the gentle Marquette and the practical Joliet and the vainglorious Hennepin. Between that day and the time when it became a course of regular and active commerce (again in Mark Twain's chronology), "seven sovereigns had occupied the throne of England, America had become an independent nation, Louis XIV and Louis XV had rotted--the French monarchy had gone down in the red tempest of the Revolution--and Napoleon was a name that was beginning to be talked about."* Of what befell in that period, marked by such figures and events, a later chapter will tell. Here our thought is of the river itself, the river of "a hundred thousand affluents," as one has characterized it; the river which for a little time bore through the valley of Louisiana and of the Illinois the name of the great French minister "Colbert."

(* "Life on the Mississippi," p. 20.)

To the Spanish the river was a hazard, a difficulty to be gotten over. To the Indian it was the place of fish and defense. To the Anglo-American empire of wheels, that later came over the mountains, it was a barrier athwart the course, to be ferried or forded or bridged, but not to be followed. To be sure, it was (later) utilized by that empire, for a little while, as a path of dominant, noisy commerce in haste to get its products to market. And the keels of commerce may come again to stir its waters. But the river will never be to its later east-and-west migrants what it was to the French, whose evangelists, both of empire and of the soul, saw its significance, caught its spirit into their veins, and (from the day when Marquette and Joliet found their courage roused, and their labor of rowing from morning till night sweetened by the joy of their expedition) have possessed the river for their own and will possess it, even though all the land belongs to others, and the rivers are put to the uses of millions to whom the beautiful speech of the French is alien. Many a time in poling or paddling a boat in its tributaries in years gone by, have I thought and said to my companion: "How less inviting this stream would be if the French with valiant, adventurous spirit had not first passed over it!" And my companion was generally one who was always "Tonty" to me. It is still the river of Marquette and Joliet, Nicolet, Groseilliers and Radisson, La Salle and Tonty, Hennepin and Accau, Gray Gowns and Black Gowns, Iberville and Bienville, St. Ange and Laclede; for across every portage into the valley of that river, it was the men of France, so far as we know, who passed, first of Europeans, from Lake Erie up to Lake Chautauqua; or across to Fort Le Boeuf and down French Creek into the Alleghany and the Ohio (La Belle Riviere); or up the Maumee and across to the Wabash (the Appian Way); or from Lake Michigan up the St. Joseph and across to the Kankakee, at South Bend; or, most trodden path of all, from Green Bay up the Fox River and across to the Wisconsin; or at Chicago from the Chicago River across to the Des Plaines (to which with the Illinois River the French seem to have given the name "Divine"), and so on to the Mississippi.

It is this last approach that I learned first and, though a smoke now hangs habitually over the entrance as a curtain, I have for myself but to push that aside to find the Divine River way still the best route into the greatest valley of the earth. Man has diverted this Divine River to very practical uses, and even changed its name, but it is hallowed still beyond all other approaches to the Great River. In a hut on the portage Pere Jacques Marquette spent his last winter on earth in sickness; down the river the brave De la Salle built his Fort St. Louis on the great rock in the midst of his prairies, and still farther down his Fort Crevecoeur. On no other affluent stream are there braver and more stirring memories of French adventure and sacrifice than move along those waters or bivouac on those banks. And so I would have one's imagination take that trail toward the Mississippi and first see it glisten beneath the tall white cliffs which stand at the portal of the Divine River entry.

Its branches are reputed to have all borne at one time the names of saints, and it had like canonization itself. But these streams of the Mississippi, like the Seine, have none or few of the qualities that make this saintly terminology appropriate. It is anthropomorphism, not canonization, that befits its temper and its lure. Mystery no longer hangs over its waters. Now that all the prairie and plain have been occupied, the mystery has fled entirely from the valley or has hidden itself in the wilderness and "bad lands." All is translated into the values of a matter- of-fact, pragmatic, industrial occupation.

These are some of the pragmatic and other facts concerning it which I have gathered from the explorers and surveyors and lovers of this region, Ogg* and Austin** and Mark Twain*** among them.

(* Ogg, F. A., "Opening of the Mississippi," New York, 1904.)
(** Austin, O. P., "Steps in the Expansion of our Territory," New York, 1903.)
(*** Mark Twain, "Life on the Mississippi," various editions.)

Its length lies wholly within the temperate zone. In this respect it is more fortunately situated than the more fertile-valleyed Amazon, since the climate here, varied and sometimes inhospitable as it is, offers conditions of human development there denied.

The main stream is two thousand five hundred and three miles in length, or more truly four thousand one hundred and ninety miles, if the Mississippi and Missouri be taken; that is, many times the length of the Seine. As Mark Twain, who is to be forever associated with its history, has said, it is "the crookedest river" in the world, travelling "one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that a crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five." For a distance of several hundred miles the Upper Mississippi is a mile in width. Back in 1882 it was seventy miles or more* wide when the flood was highest, and in 1912 sixty miles wide. The volume of water discharged by it into the sea is second only to the Amazon, and is greater than that of all European rivers combined--Seine, Rhine, Rhone, Po, Danube, and all the rest, omitting the Volga. The amount is estimated at one hundred and fifty-nine cubic miles annually--that is, it would fill annually a tank one hundred and fifty-nine miles long, a mile wide, and a mile high. With its tributaries it provides somewhat more than sixteen thousand miles of navigable water, more than any other system on the globe except the Amazon, and more than enough to reach from Paris to Lake Superior by way of Kamchatka and Alaska--about three-fourths of the way around the globe.

(* Mark Twain, "Life on the Mississippi," p. 456.)

The sediment carried to the sea is estimated at four hundred million tons* annually. As one has put it, it would require daily for its removal five hundred trains of fifty cars, each carrying fifty tons, and would make two square miles each year over a hundred and thirty feet deep. Mark Twain in "Life on the Mississippi" is authority for the statement that the muddy water of the Missouri is more wholesome than other waters, until it has settled, when it is no better than that of the Ohio, for example. If you let a pint of it settle you will have three-fourths of an inch of mud in the bottom. His advice is to keep it stirred up.**

(* Humphrey's and Abbot's estimate.)
(** "Life on the Mississippi," p. 182.)

The area which it drains is roughly a million and a quarter square miles, or two-fifths of the United States. That is, as one graphic historian has visualized it in European terms, Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, and Italy could be set down within its limits and there would still be some room to spare.

The river has the strength (for the most part put to no use) of sixty million horses. The difference between high water and low water in flood conditions is in some places fifty feet, which shows that it has a wider range of moodiness than even the Seine.

The rim dividing the Mississippi basin from that of the Great Lakes is, as we have seen, low and narrow; in some places, especially in wet seasons, the watershed is indistinguishable. The waters know not which way to go. This fact furnishes the explanation of the ease with which the French explorers penetrated the valley from the north. A high mountain range kept the English colonists out of it from the east. The Spanish found no physical barriers at the south (except the water, which gave the Frenchmen help), but, as we have seen, on the other hand, they found no adequate inducement.

The isotherm which touches the southern limits of France passes midway between the source and mouth of the river. In the northern half, it has the mean annual temperature of France, England, and Germany; in the southern half, of the Mediterranean coasts.

From the gulf into which it empties, a river (that is, an ocean river, or current) runs through the ocean to the western coasts of Europe; another runs out along the northeastern coast of South America, and, still another is in waiting at the western terminus of the Panama Canal to assist the ships across the Pacific.

A fair regularity and reliability of rainfall have made the rich soil of the valley tillable and productive without irrigation, except in the far western stretches; and these blessings are likely to continue, as one authority puts it, "so long as the earth continues to revolve toward the east and the present relationship of ocean and continent continues."

Including Texas and Alabama (which lie between the same ranges of mountains with this valley, though their rivers run into the gulf and not into the Mississippi), this valley has perhaps one hundred and forty thousand miles of railway, or about sixty per cent of the total mileage of the country, or twenty-five per cent of the mileage of the entire globe.

"In richness of soil, variety of climate, number and value of products, facilities for communication and general conditions of wealth and prosperity, the Mississippi Valley surpasses anything known to the Old World as well as the New." It produces the bulk of the world's cotton and oil; of corn it raises much more than all the rest of the world combined, and of each of the following (produced mainly in this same valley) the United States leads in quantity all the nations of the earth: wheat, cattle, hogs, oats, hay, lumber, coal, iron and steel, and other mineral products.

Its valley supports an estimated population of over fifty millions, or over half that of the whole United States; and has an estimated maintenance capacity of from 200,000,000* to 350,000,000 or from four to seven times its present population. It has been tilled with "luxurious carelessness." A peasant in Brittany or a forester in Normandy would be scandalized by the extravagant, profligate use of its patrimony. That it is likely to have at least the 250,000,000 by the year 2100, and with intensive cultivation will be able to support them, is allowed by estimates of reliable statisticians.** Europe had 175,000,000 at the beginning of the nineteenth century and North America 5,308,000. The former has somewhat more than doubled its population in the century since; America has increased hers about twenty times, and the Mississippi Valley several thousand times. It is not unreasonable to expect the doubling of the population of that valley in another century and its quadrupling in two.

(* Justin Winsor, "Mississippi Basin," p. 4.)
(** A. B. Hart, "Future of the Mississippi Valley," Harper's Magazine, 100:419, February, 1900.)

Let De Tocqueville make summary of those prideful items in his description of the valley, embraced by the equator-sloping half of the continent: "It is upon the whole," he says, "the most magnificent dwelling-place prepared by God for man's abode"--a "space of 1,341,649 square miles--about six times that of France"--watered by a river "which, like a god of antiquity, dispenses both good and evil."*

(* "Democracy in America," 1:22, 21, 20. New York, 1898.)

And it was still another Frenchman who first gave to the world an accurate description of the sources of the river. On his own account, Nicollet, sometime professor in the College Louis le Grand, set out in 1831 to explore the river from its mouth to the source. He spent five years in these regions which he described as "a grand empire possessing the grandest natural limits on the earth." He then returned to a little Catholic college in Baltimore as a teacher, but the United States Government, hearing of his valuable service, commissioned him to make another expedition that would enable him to complete his map of the region of the sources. What he then accomplished has given him "distinct and conspicuous place among the explorers of the Mississippi." His map shows myriad lakes in the region of the sources (where the slightest jar of earth might turn in other directions the water of these brimming bowls), so many indeed, that there would seem to be only lake and marsh and savannas. But we see him looking off toward plateaus "looming as if [they were] a distant shore." Another picture I shall always keep from his report is of his stolid half-breed guide (who usually waited for him and his companion with face toward them) sitting one day somewhat ahead of the party on a slight elevation, which makes the watershed between the rivers of the north and the rivers of the south, his face turned from them, gazing in silent rapture upon the boundless stretch of plains.

How their magical influence possessed him, as well as that child of forest and plain, Nicollet, a peasant boy of Savoy, a professor in Paris, interrupts his topographical report to tell: "It is difficult to express by words the varied impressions which the spectacle of these prairies produces. Their sight never wearies. To look a prairie up or down, to ascend one of its undulations, to reach a small plateau (or, as the voyageurs call it, a prairie planche), moving from wave to wave over alternate swells and depressions and finally to reach the vast, interminable low prairie that extends itself in front--(be it for hours, days or weeks)--one never tires; pleasurable and exhilarating sensations are all the time felt; ennui is never experienced. Doubtless there are moments when excessive heat, a want of fresh water, and other privations remind one that life is a toil; but these drawbacks are of short duration. There are no concealed dangers--no difficulties of road; a far-spreading verdure, relieved by a profusion of variously colored flowers, the azure of the sky above, or the tempest that can be seen from its beginning to its end, the beautiful modifications of the changing clouds, the curious looming of objects between earth and sky, taxing the ingenuity every moment to rectify--all, everything, is calculated to excite the perceptions and keep alive the imagination. In the summer season, especially, everything upon the prairies is cheerful, graceful, and animated. The Indians, with herds of deer, antelope and buffalo, give life and motion to them. It is then they should be visited; and I pity the man whose soul could remain unmoved under such a scene of excitement."*

(* Report intended to illustrate a map of the hydrographical basin of the upper Mississippi River, Washington, 1843, 26th Cong., 2d Sess., Sen. Doc. 237, p. 52.)

It is a singular fortune that has made a son of France, a century and a half after the discovery of this mighty stream, the explorer and cartographer of its sources, a fortune that has its partial explanation at least in the lure of this stream for the Gallic heart.

Mrs. Trollope, a famous English traveller, found its lower valley depressing, as has many another: "Unwonted to European eyes and mystically heavy is the eternal gloom that seems to have settled upon that region. Whatever wind may blow, however bright and burning the southern sun may blaze in the unclouded sky, the stream is forever turbid and forever dark." Of the scene at its mouth, where La Salle and his men had sung with such joy, she says: "Had Dante seen it, he might have drawn images of another Bolgia from its horrors."* But no French visitor, so far as I know, has ever found it gloomy, even in flood or tempest on its subtropical stretches; nor has he found those level vastnesses desolate. A traveller, Paul Fountain by name, and so of French origin, I suspect, wandering over those valley plains in the early days, tells of the sense of freedom, health, and strength that they give: "There is no air like the prairie air--not even the grand freshness of the boundless ocean itself.--The loveliness and variety of the prairie odors are quite indescribable, as are its superb wild flowers. It is a paradise. No man who has lived on it long enough to know it and love it (no great time, I can assure you) ever experiences real happiness after he has left it. There is a longing and eager craving to return to the life. The vulgar cowboys and hunters, uneducated and unpoetical past all degree, never leave it except to get drunk. Their money gone, back they go to get fresh strength and more pelf for another orgie; but if by chance they abandon the wild, free life, they soon drink themselves to lunacy or death, and their last babblings are of the glorious wilderness they all love."** This is the too exuberant expression of one who had probably never had a hearth of his own in France, but it gives some intimation of the charm of that great and seemingly infinite sweep of level ground, which many, and especially unimaginative minds, find so monotonous.

(* "Domestic Manners of the Americans," p. r.)
(** "The Great Deserts and Forests of North America," p. 22.)

We cannot be quite sure, when we listen to some recent critics, that Chateaubriand ever saw this great valley. Certainly we who have grown up in it have never found his reindeer and moose about our homes (save in our Christmas-time imaginations). Paroquets that in the woods repeated the words learned of settlers are not of the fauna known to reputable Ohio naturalists, nor have two-headed snakes been found except in the vision of those who see double in their intoxication. The tamarind and the terebinth are not of its forest-trees. But whether or not Chateaubriand visited it in person, his imagination had frequent residence upon the Mississippi and its tributaries. His "Atala" put into French literature a country where many have loved to dwell, though its fauna and flora were not more accurate in some respects than the mineralogy and meteorology of the John Law scheme, known later as the "Mississippi Bubble," that made France wild with excitement once. However, I have recalled the fervid pen of Chateaubriand, not as that of a faunal or floral naturalist, but to have it rewrite these sentences: "Nothing is more surprising and magnificent than this movement and this distribution of the central waters of North America" (whence flows the Mississippi), "a river which the French first descended; a river which flowed under their power, and the rich valley of which," as the translator has rendered it, "still regrets their genius," but, as Chateaubriand doubtless meant it, and as it is better translated, "still grieves for their spirit," their "familiar" ("et dont la riche vallee regrette encore leur genie").*

(* "Travels in America and Italy," 1:72, 73, London, 1828.)

I think that Chateaubriand had accurate instinct in divining the river's grieving for the spirit that (with all the practical genius which now inhabits the valley) is still needed to give an appreciation of that in the valley which lies beyond the counting of statistics or even the glowing rhetoric of the orators of liberty.

Hamlin Garland, reared in that valley, and first known in American letters as the author of remarkable stories of life on a Western farm, "Main Travelled Roads," has recently given expression to this grieving (though he says no word of the French) in an essay on "The Silent Mississippi," published a few years ago. He speaks of the river's bold, blue-green bluffs "looking away into haze," of its golden bars of sand "jutting out into the burnished stream," of its thickets of yellow-green willows, of the splendid old trees and of its glades opening away to the hills (all making a magical way of beauty), only to use it as a background for the statement that "not one beautiful building" is to be seen on its banks "for a thousand miles." There are many towns, but "without a single distinctive building; everything is a flimsy jumble, out of key, meaningless, impertinent, evanescent, too, thanks to climate." "We took a wild land beautiful as a dream," he proceeds, "and we have made a refuse heap. The birds of the trees have disappeared, the water-fowl have gone, every edible creature has vanished. An era of hopeless, distinctive vulgarity is upon us."

I have travelled down the smaller waterways of the valley with like feeling, which, though it has led to no such comprehensive generalization, yet gave me a distinct consciousness of their "grieving," if not for the French, at any rate for the silences that preceded the French, and for their own riparian architecture. The busy towns along the streams I have known have turned their faces from these streams toward the railroads. They have left the riverside to the thriftless men and the truant boys. Stables and outhouses look upon their waters, and the sewers pollute them. And if on some especially eligible bluff better buildings do stand, their owners or builders show no appreciation of what the bluff or river cares for, but reproduce the lines of some pretentious edifice that has no relation, historic or otherwise, to it or to the site. The old mills, with their feet in the water, are almost the only sympathetic structures-- especially so when they are in ruins.

I once followed the upper waters of the stream (the Ohio) along which Celoron, of whom I shall speak later, planted his emblems of French possession. He would doubtless care to claim that valley even to-day, though unsightly houses and sheds line it, and pipes and shafts of iron, hastily rigged up and left to rust when done with, run everywhere, and the scum of oil is on the water. The profit of the hour was all that was visible of motive or achievement in that smoky valley, though I know it is not safe to generalize, for miracles have been wrought in that very valley.

A change is coming in many of the towns and cities of both the lesser and the larger rivers. In the town that I knew best, thirty years ago only a few ventured upon the water, and they were the fishermen or rivermen who had not much to do with the community life; now the steam or gasolene launch is making these streams highways of pleasure, and so is bringing them within the daily life of thousands.

Waiting for a boat in St. Louis one beautiful summer morning on the quay, where in Paris I should have found the book-stalls, I saw a Pullman train just starting for New York, and at the water's edge under the stately bridge one tramp "barbering" another. But, reading the morning paper, I found by chance that back in the city there was one man at least, a teacher and artist, who had the old-time French feeling for the grieving river. It was dark before I found him, after my day on a steamboat whose most important passenger, pointed out to me with some apparent pride by the old-time captain, was a brewer, author of a brew more famous in those parts than the artist's river pictures which I saw by candle-light that night in his schoolroom.

The artist had his river studio upon one of the beautiful cliffs which La Salle must have seen when he came out of the Illinois into the Mississippi. And it was within a few miles of that studio, it may be added, that I found, too, one noteworthy exception to Mr. Hamlin Garland's statement concerning riparian architecture.

These are hopeful intimations succeeding the fading of the last traces in that region of the old French days, traces which I found a few hours' journey below St. Louis, in the village of Prairie du Rocher (locally pronounced Prary de Roosh); for Cahokia, where I stopped first, had no mark of the French regime except the "congregation," which was, as the priest told me, two hundred years old. The village had no distinctiveness. But Prairie du Rocher had its own atmosphere and charm. French skies never produced a more glorious August sunset than I saw through the Corot trees of that village, which stands or reclines beneath the cliffs and looks off toward the river that has receded far to the westward. I tried to find the old French records of which I had heard, but there was a new priest who knew not the French; yet I did not need them to assure me that the French had been there. At dawn, after such a peaceful night as one might have in upper Carcasonne, I found my way to the river near which are the ruins of Fort Chartres--all that is left of the greatest French fortress in the Mississippi Valley, the last to yield to man and the last to surrender to nature. The town, Nouvelle Chartres, with all its color and gayety, has become a corn field, and only the magazine of the fort remains, hidden, a gunshot from the river, among the weeds, bushes, vines, and trees.

Fourteen miles below is the site of the oldest French village in the upper valley. But the river was jealous and took it all, foundation and roof, to itself. The charms of old Kaskaskia, the sometime capital of all that region, are "one with Nineveh and Tyre." Not a vestige is left of its first days and only a broken structure or two of its later glory.

Nor is there any other trace, so far as I could learn, anywhere down the winding stream till one reaches New Orleans. The red sun-worshippers in their white garments--familiar of old to the French--even they have followed their divinity toward its setting, and only among those with African shadows in their faces do they still sing, as I have heard, of the "brave days of D'Artaguette." The monuments do not remember beyond the bravery and carnage of the Civil War, or at farthest beyond the War of 1812. I was myself apprehended for a foreign spy one day while I was searching too near to the guns of a present fort for more ancient monuments.

The great river and some of its tributaries have a commerce, but it is of an inanimate and unappealing kind. They no longer draw the throngs daily to the wharfs as in the days of the glory of the steamboat. Everybody is in too much of a hurry to travel by water.

An old Mississippi River steamboat captain* has written a reminiscent book, in which he tells with sorrow of the departed majesty and glory of the river, the glamour remaining only in the memories of those who knew the river sixty years or more ago. He laments the passing of that mighty fleet, destroyed by the very civilization that built it--a civilization which cut down the impounding forests and so removed the great natural dams which must in time be replaced by artificial ones if the rivers are ever to run full again in the dry seasons and not overflow in the wet. It is that day of the Mississippi that is best known in our literature. Mark Twain has put forever on the map of letters (where the Euphrates, the Nile, the Ilyssus, the Tiber, the Seine, the Thames long have been) the Mississippi, the river which the French first traced upon the maps of geography. So we are especially indebted to the French for Mark Twain, who began his career as a "cub" pilot on the river which in turn gave him the name by which the world is ever to know him.

(* George B. Merrick, "Old Times on the Upper Mississippi," Cleveland, A. H. Clark Co., 1909.)

It was he who once wrote of this river: "The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book--a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparklingly renewed with every reperusal."*

(* "Life on the Mississippi," pp. 82-83.)

When I was entering the English Channel on my way to Havre, the captain showed me what varied courses must be taken at different hours and different days to gain full advantage of tide and current and yet avoid all danger. But, as this Mississippi River pilot has observed, it is now a comparatively easy undertaking to learn to run these buoyed and lighted ship channels; it was then quite another matter to pilot a steamboat in the Mississippi or Missouri, "whose alluvial banks cave and change constantly, whose snags are always hunting up new quarters, whose sand- bars are never at rest, whose channels are forever dodging and shirking, and whose obstructions" had fifty years ago to be "confronted in all nights and all weathers without the aid of a single lighthouse or a single buoy."* And yet that man, who came to know, in age, the courses of human emotions the world over, could, as a young man, shut his eyes and trace the river from St. Louis to New Orleans, and read its face as one "would cull the news from a morning paper."

(* "Life on the Mississippi," p. 86.)

It was for years a wish of mine that when Mark Twain should come to die, he should lie not in an ordinary sepulchre of earth but in the river which he knew so well and loved, and of whose golden days he sang. I wished that the river might be turned aside from its wonted channel, as the River Busentinus for the interment of Alaric, and then, after his burial there, be let back into it again, that he might ever hear the sonorous voice of its waters above him, and, perhaps, now and then the call of the leadsman overhead, crying the depth beneath, as he himself in the pilot-house used once to hear the call "Mark Twain" from the darkness below. So it was a disappointment to me that when the world followed him to his grave it was to a little patch of earth outside the valley, beyond the reach of even the farthest tributary of the Mississippi.

The great river has been the course of one empire and the scene of many. Spain, France, England, and the United States have each claimed its mastery, as we have seen or shall see. The Germans once dreamed of a state on its banks, but could not agree as to the locality (Minnesota or Texas), so variedly tempting was the fertility of its upper and its lower waters. The sons of the Norsemen are now tilling the land around its sources. Indeed, it has now upon its banks and within the reach of its myriad streams a babel of earth's races, although the river has not, as the River of the Lotus Flower, conformed them to one uniform type.

We are beginning now to realize more keenly that the river has yet to be conquered. It has yielded complete sovereignty to no people. It has made light of the emblems of empire. It has even ignored the white, channel- marking signals of the government that now exercises lordship over all the land it drains. Its untamed spirit flaunts continual challenge in the face of all men. It has had in derision the building of cities and towns. One town, for example, has been left to choose between being left high and dry five miles from water, or of meeting the fate of old Kaskaskia. And though the town has already thrown a million dollars to the river, as if to some unappeased god, the river is merciless. One town and another have been ostracized or destroyed, their wharfs left far inland or carried away to some commerceless bayou. The sentiment I have regarding the river makes it difficult to excuse its infidelity toward one little French town in particular, St. Genevieve. I can do so only by assuming that the river has cared less for its later inhabitants than it did for those who gave it name. It has laughed at the embankments on which hundreds of millions have been spent by nation, state, and private enterprise to keep its flood in restraint. Shorn of its trees, as Samson of his long hair, it has pulled down the pillars of man's raising into its own destroying waters. In 1912 a space nearly two and a half times the size of the State of New Jersey was devastated.* In 1913 the loss in a single year was one hundred and sixty million dollars.** In the last thirty years it is estimated the loss has been a half of a billion, and it would have been immensely greater, of course, if the river had not been given unchallenged freedom of great, unclaimed swamps. And yet the river has never at any one time massed its great army of waters. At one time it has been the Ohio, at another the Missouri, and then the Red that it has sent against the fortifications. If all these streams were to be brought in flood at once the lower valley would be swept clean.

(* Seventeen thousand six hundred and five square miles.)
(** One hundred and sixty-three million, U. S. Weather Bureau estimate.)

So it is no martial simile that I am using. It is a real battle that is continuously on. The gaunt sharp-shooter, pacing the embankment with Winchester in hand to shoot any burrowing confederate of the river, a rat, or mole, is a real and not an imaginary figure. And the battles that have been fought along its course are as play by the side of those yet to be waged before it is subdued by man.

It is fitly the War Department of the government that has been watching its every movement, that has set the signals on its fitful tide, and that has recorded its every shift for years as if it were an animate enemy. Its changing area, velocity, discharge--items of infinite permutations--are all noted and analyzed. But the war department of the government is still almost as powerless to control the river as the Yazoo farmer who watches its changing moods, not by instruments but by the movement of an eddy in his own hidden bayou. The battle is with floods, shallows, and erosion, but it is essentially a battle with floods, for not until their strongholds are taken, controlled, is the complete conquest assured. It was control of the mouth of the river that seemed so important in early days. The effort to obtain that led ultimately to the purchase of Louisiana (that is, the west bank of the river) from the French by the United States. It was the confirmation of that security of navigation which gave the battle of New Orleans its high significance. Then the mouth (thus obtained) was found too shallow for the demands of commerce, and there followed what some one with poetic instincts has called the battle of the shoals, a battle in which General Eads, who had bridged the river at St. Louis, compelled the river by means of jetties to run deeper and carry heavier burdens.

But the future battle-fields are perceived to lie toward the sources, at the eaves, as it were, of the watersheds, the headwaters of its tributaries as well as its own. No deepening, embanking, straightening, canalization of the river is to be permanently effective until all danger of flood can be removed.

Wandering among those tributaries, seeing the trickling fountains of several of them, watching the timid stream in the naked, deforested fields (not knowing quite which way to go, east or west, north or south), I have been strongly appealed to by the plan of impounding in reservoirs these first waters, whose freedom (no longer restrained in youth by the sage forests) makes them libertines and wantons in the distant valleys below.

Such impounding has successful inauguration in five small reservoirs now in operation on the headwaters of the Mississippi out of forty-two planned. An ambitious plan for controlling the turbulent Ohio by a system of from seventeen to forty-three reservoirs at an estimated cost of from twenty to thirty-four millions of dollars has been suggested by Mr. M. O. Leighton of the United States Geological Survey, and received indorsement from the Pittsburgh Flood Commission, the Dayton Flood Commission, and the National Waterways Commission. These would suffice to keep the lawless waters within temperate bounds in the spring and to give more generous navigable currents in the summer and autumn. Against the great expense of such a project is set the tremendous possibilities in the development of water-power. Of the theoretical sixty millions of horse-power in the current of the Mississippi, it is estimated that about six and a half millions can be economically developed throughout the year, while twelve millions could be developed during six months or more without storage reservoirs. An adequate system of reservoirs might double or treble these totals, while a million or two would be immediately available to begin the payment of the debt, and more of the strength would be harnessed to that purpose in time. So, it is urged, the river would be made to meet the expense of its own conquest.*

(* See reports of the National Conservation Commission in 1909; National Waterways Commission, 1912; Report Commissioner of Corporations on Water-Power Development in the United States, 1912; J. L. Mathews "Remaking the Mississippi," Boston, 1909.)

And once that is done the river may be straightened, shortened, deepened, leveed, and made a docile, reliable carrier of commerce. It may then be compelled to a respect for cities and government signals and wharfs and mills. And the astute suggestion of the practical Joliet for the canalization of its waters, may be realized in the safe passage not merely of boats but of stately, giant, ocean-sized vessels from the Great Lakes to the gulf.

A hundred years ago (1809) one Nicholas Roosevelt, commissioned of Robert Fulton (the inventor of the steamboat) and others, was sent to Pittsburgh to build the first steamboat to be launched in western waters. So confident was this young man of the success of steamboat navigation of the Ohio and Mississippi that, on his journey of inspection, he purchased coal-mines along the way and arranged to have the coal piled up on the river bank against the time of its need by boats whose keels had not been laid and whose existence even depended upon the approval of eastern capitalists. It suggests the prevision of the nephew, Theodore Roosevelt, in making provision for the coaling of ships in the east long before the Spanish War was in sight. I was on the Marquette-Joliet portage the very day that this same nephew was predicting with like confidence to the people of St. Louis that the Mississippi would be deepened till from the lakes to the gulf it should be a course for seagoing vessels. Champlain suggested the Panama Canal three hundred years before its building. Joliet, in 1673, suggested the lakes-to-the-gulf ship waterway,* and by the three-hundredth anniversary, perhaps, it will be completed.

(* Margry, 1:268.)

I made a journey in 1911 that began at the first settlements of the French in Nova Scotia, touched the Bay of Chaleur and the lower St. Lawrence, and then followed the French water paths all the way to the mouth of the Mississippi, where the master of pilots, a descendant of France, carried me out into the Gulf of Mexico. Starting back before dawn in a little boat, I saw, just as the sun was coming up over the swamps where the river begins to divide, the hulk of a great seagoing vessel against the morning sky. It seemed then a gloomy apparition; but as I think of it now it was rather the presage of the new commerce than the ghost of that which has departed.

That the Valley of a Hundred Thousand Streams--streams that together touch every community of any size from the Alleghanies to the Rockies--streams whose waters all find their way sooner or later into the Mississippi--will ever give up battle till the great water itself is conquered, no one who knows the determined people in that valley will ever question. The sixty million people will not be resisted permanently by the sixty million horses of the river, though the strength of the horses be driven by all the clouds that the gulf sends up the valley to its aid. Some day the great, free River Colbert will run vexed of impenetrable, unyielding walls to the sea. Its "titanic ambition for quiet flowing" down this beautiful, gently sloping valley to the gulf (which, as one has said, "has been its longing through ages") will have been turned to human ministry. The spirit of the great water will have become as patient, as thoughtless of its own wild comfort or ambitions as that of the priest who dedicated it to the honor of the mother of the most patient of men.

The readers who have through these chapters been companions of Champlain, La Salle, Joliet, Marquette, and others in the discovery of the mighty rivers and the conquest of the mighty vastnesses of the new world will have, if they continue, yet before them even harder and more disheartening ventures, as La Salle himself had that April day in 1682, when he turned from the column which he had planted in sight of the Gulf of Mexico, four thousand miles from the Cape of Labrador, and began to drive his canoes up the river which he had traced forever, if too tortuously, on the maps of the earth.

During the chapter since we reached the shores of that lonely sea without a sail, we have, covering in prospect two centuries, contemplated the majesty of that river of a hundred thousand affluents.

Now, as we turn our faces toward the lakes and Canada again, a century of hardship confronts us. If the readers endure it with me, as I have endured it again and again, they will have added again to their France and their United States memories more precious than the titles to boundless prairies and trackless forests.

La Salle was not content with the discovery of the great waterway to the gulf, the tracing of whose course had ended all dreams of a shorter route to China by aid of its current. In place of his La Chine dream grew another dream: to open this valley to France from the south instead of from the north, where the way was long and perilous, closed half the year by ice and storm, and beset all the year by hostile intrigue, envy, and dishonesty of colonial officials. A Franco-Indian colony was to be established along the Illinois under the protection of Fort St. Louis on the Rock. Ultimately a chain of forts and colonies would hold the watercourse all the way from gulf to gulf-from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico-maintained by revenues from the hides and wool of the buffalo then roaming the woods and prairies and plains from one side of the valley to the other; the Indians would gather about these centres for gain and protection; and in the midst of this wilderness he would hold for France the empire that the inscription on the column at the mouth of the river claimed. The crows might fly about his fields, but they could not then touch his rich crops. Griffins--flocks, fleets of griffins--would fly above them.

That was the vision with which he started northward from the mouth of the great river, the vision out of which he might at once have been starved except for the meat of alligators shot along the way. Seized of a dangerous illness, he sent Tonty on to Mackinaw to forward news of the discovery to Canada, and unable, even after months of Father Membre's care, to go to Paris to prepare for the carrying out of his great scheme, he, joined by Tonty, climbs the Rock St. Louis and lays out ramparts on its crest, of which I thought I discovered traces many years ago. It was another Rock of Quebec, rising sheer a hundred and twenty-five feet above the river in the midst of the prairie. About it gathered under his protection many tribes of Indians, in common dread of the Iroquois, in common hope, doubtless, of gain from commerce with the French. La Salle, in a report to be found in the archives of the Marine in Paris, states that his extemporized colony numbered four thousand warriors, or twenty thousand souls.* It had come up as Jonah's gourd and might as quickly wither, as the village of the Illinois but a few years previous had withered into desolation in a few hours before the hot breath of the terrorizing fame of the Iroquois. From his seigniorial aerie he sent messages to the governor of Canada, no longer the friendly Frontenac but a Pharaoh who knew not this Joseph, praying for cooperation, saying that he could not leave his red allies lest, if the Iroquois should strike in his absence, they would think him in league with their dread enemies; asking that his men who go down with hides in exchange for munitions be not retained as outlaws; urging that it is for the advantage of his creditors (for his losses had amounted to forty thousand crowns) that they do not seize his goods-since the means of meeting all his debts would then be destroyed-and begging for more men with whom to make this colony permanent and gather the more remote Indian tribes around the sheltering Rock St. Louis.**

(* Margry, 2:363. Parkman, "La Salle," pp. 317, 318.)
(** Margry, 2:314. Parkman, "La Salle," pp. 320-324.)

But it was not such prayers that reached Louis XIV, who, on May 10, 1682, before La Salle's report of the discovery of the Mississippi arrived at Versailles, had directed that no further permission should be given to make journeys of discovery toward the Mississippi, as the colonists might better be employed in cultivating the lands.

This is an example of the advice the king is receiving from his governor in Quebec: "You will see that ... [La Salle] has been bold enough to give you intelligence of a false discovery and that, instead of returning to the colony to learn what the King wishes him to do, he does not come near me, but keeps in the backwoods, five hundred leagues off, with the idea of attracting the inhabitants to him, and building up an imaginary kingdom for himself, by debauching all the bankrupts and idlers of this country, ... All the men who brought me news from him have abandoned him, and say not a word about returning, but sell the furs they have brought as if they were their own; so that he cannot hold his ground much longer."*

(* Parkman, "La Salle," p. 323.)

Meanwhile the king, the same king who five years before had said in La Salle's commission that he had "nothing more at heart" than the exploration of that country, writes to the governor of Canada from Fontainebleau: "I am convinced, as you, that the discovery of the Sieur de la Salle is very useless, and that such enterprises ought to be prevented in the future."*

(* Parkman, "La Salle," p. 324.)

In his extremity, his supplies cut off, his men sent to Quebec deserting with the profits of his hides, La Salle leaves Tonty on the Rock, starts for Quebec, intending to go to France, meets on the way an officer appointed to succeed him in all his wilderness authority, and in the spring of 1684 is again a lodger in Rue de la Truanderie, a miserable little street in Paris where, as I have said before, I have tried to locate the lodging of the valiant soul who once dwelt upon the mysterious rock near my boyhood home.

Thence this man of "solitary disposition," whose life had been joined to savages, and who had for years had "neither servants, clothes nor fare which did not savor more of meanness than of ostentation," and who was of such natural timidity that it took him a week "to make up his mind to go to an audience" with Monseigneur de Conti, is summoned to an interview with the king himself.

La Salle's memorials, which recall by way of introduction his five journeys of upward of five thousand leagues, in great part on foot, through more than six hundred leagues of unknown country among savages and cannibals, and at the cost of one hundred and fifty thousand francs, and which propose projects that seem in some of their features quixotic and visionary, received favorable consideration of the king and his minister Colbert's son. La Salle's wilderness empire is restored to him and he is granted four ships in which to carry soldiers, mechanics, and laborers to establish a fort and colony at the mouth of the Mississippi, to open up all the interior of America from the south, and incidentally to make war on the Spaniards (who were claiming the gulf for their own), and to seize their valuable mines.

The quarrellings of this expedition (due in part to the divided command); the failure to find the mouth of the Mississippi since, we are told, La Salle had been unable in 1682 to determine its longitude; the landing on the shores of Texas, far beyond the mouth of the Mississippi; the loss of one of the vessels to the Spanish, the wreck of two others, and the return of the fourth to France; the miserable fate of the colony left on those desolate shores; the long search of La Salle and his companions for the "fatal river"--these make a dismal story whose details cannot be rehearsed here, a story whose tragic end was the murder of La Salle by one of his own disaffected followers in March, 1687, on the banks of the Trinity River.

There is time, as we hasten on, for only a few words over the body of this "iron man," left "a prey to the buzzards and wolves" of the wilderness in which he sacrificed all, as Champlain, for France.

"One of the greatest men of his age," said Tonty, who was nearest to him in all his labors save his last. "Without question one of the most remarkable explorers whose names live in history," writes Parkman.* His "personality is impressed in some respects more strongly than that of any other upon the history of New France," says another historian, Fiske.** "For force of will and vast conceptions; for various knowledge and quick adaptation of his genius to untried circumstances; for a sublime magnanimity, that resigned itself to the will of Heaven, and yet triumphed over affliction by energy of purpose and unfaltering hope--this daring adventurer had no superior among his countrymen," says Bancroft.*** And further, in the estimate of a recent historian of the valley, "for all the qualities of rugged manhood, courage, persistency that could not be broken, contempt of pain and hardship, he has never been surpassed."****

(* Parkman, "La Salle," p. 430.)
(** "New France and New England," p. 132.)
(*** "History of the United States," 3: 173.)
(**** James K. Hosmer, "Short History of the Mississippi Valley," p. 140.)

Let him who next to Tonty knew him better than all the other chroniclers say a last word--one which will justify the time that we have given to following the fortunes and adversities of this spirit, unbroken to the last: "He was a tower of adamant, against whose impregnable front hardship and danger, the rage of man and of the elements, the southern sun, the northern blast, fatigue, famine, disease, delay, disappointment and deferred hope, emptied their quivers in vain.... Never under the impenetrable mail of paladin or crusader beat a heart of more intrepid mettle than within the stoic panoply that armed the breast of La Salle. To estimate aright the marvels of his patient fortitude, one must follow on his track through the vast scene of his interminable journeyings.... America owes him an enduring memory; for in this masculine figure she sees the pioneer who guided her to her richest heritage."*

(* Parkman, "La Salle," p. 432.)

France had deserved well of that valley had she done nothing more than to set that rugged, fearless figure in the heart of America, a perpetual foil to effeminacy and submission to softening luxury, to the arts that seek merely popularity, to drunkenness and other vices which he combated even in that wilderness, to sycophancy and demagogy--a perpetual example of the "vir" and virtue in the noblest sense in which mankind has defined them.

In the grand amphitheatre in the Sorbonne, I witnessed one day in Paris a celebration of the conquests of the French language in lands outside of France: conquests in the islands of the West Indies, where La Salle suffered all but death; in Canada, where he had his first visions; and in Louisiana, where he perished. Though his name was not spoken, it were a reason for greater celebration in France that the spirit of such a Frenchman as La Salle had enduring memory in the severe ideals of manhood that are for all time to possess the men of that valley to which he guided the world.

There is a grave for which I wished to make search in Rouen, the grave of the mother of La Salle, to whom he wrote in 1684: "I hope ... to embrace you a year hence with all the pleasure that the most grateful of children can feel with so good a mother as you have always been."* I wish I could have made her know--but since I could not, I tried to let France know instead--that there are millions who could speak to-day as the most "grateful of children" what her son and France's son was never permitted to utter.

(* Parkman, "La Salle," p. 364.)

La Salle's dream of New France did not fade with his last sight of his empire of Louisiana. But the century in which he was born and died had all but gone out before the stirring of his life's vision and sacrifice, strengthened by appeal of the gallant and faithful Tonty, resulted in the offer by one who has been called the "Cid of Canada," Le Moyne d'Iberville, to carry out the schemes of La Salle, and it was becoming clear that France must act at once or England would build the glorious structure which La Salle had designed. In the offer of this young Canadian and his brother Bienville were the purposes that gave substantial foundation to Louisiana. Sailing with their two ships in 1699, they were caught in the "strong, muddy current of fresh water," which La Salle had unluckily passed without seeing. They entered this stream and, after several days of exploration, had verification of the identity of the river in a letter (or "speaking bark," as the Indians called it), dated the 2Oth of April, 1685, which Tonty, years before, when making the journey down the river in search of La Salle, had left in the hands of an Indian chief to be delivered to La Salle, or, as the chief called him, "the man who should come up the river."

The fortunes which befell those of this colony, trying to find a suitable site in that land of bushes and cane-brakes, are not agreeable to follow. For thirteen years the "paternal providence of Versailles" watched over them, sending them marriageable women, soldiers, priests, and nuns, but so little food that famine and pestilence often came to their miserable stockades. They were under injunction "to seek out pearl fisheries," "to catch bison-calves, tame them and take their wool," and "to look for mines." What employment for the founders of an empire!*

(* In one of the branches of that river at whose mouth they settled I saw a summer or two ago, one of the men of that valley wading in its water, still in search of pearls. A pearl worth a thousand dollars had once been found near by, and so (in the same hope that animated the mind of King Louis XIV) man after man in that neighborhood had abandoned his fertile farm to search for pearls, only to be reduced, as the poor settlers of early, Louisiana, to live upon the shell-fish in which the pearls refused to grow.)

One cannot resist the temptation to say again: If only Louis XIV had had the good sense, unblinded of pearls and gold and bigotry and some other things, to let the industrious, skilled Huguenots, flying from France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, settle in Louisiana, instead of forcing them to swell the numbers of the English colonies on the Atlantic coast, and eventually assist them in taking the New France from which they had been debarred!

The French engineer of an English ship, appearing on the river one day, had furtively handed Bienville a petition of four hundred Huguenots in the Carolinas to be allowed to settle in Louisiana and to have the privilege of worship, such as is enjoyed to-day. The answer came from Versailles to the cane-brakes--from Versailles, where, amid scenes "which no European court could rival," the "greatest of France, princes, warriors, statesmen," were gathered week after week in the "Halls of Abundance, Venus, Mars and Apollo," from Versailles to the half-starved little group sitting in exile by the gulf, far from abundance, without love, in dread of Mars, and with no arts of Apollo save the sound of the wind in the trees and the moan of the sea: "Have I expelled heretics from France in order that they should set up a republic in America?"

One has reminded us that while Iberville was making almost futile attempts with the half-hearted support of his government to establish this colony at the mouth of the Mississippi, Peter the Great was beginning to lay the foundations of St. Petersburg in as unpromising a place--a barren, uncultivated island which was a frozen swamp in winter and a heap of mud in summer, in the midst of pathless forests and deep morasses haunted by wolves and bears. Peter the Great spent great treasure in clearing the forests, draining the swamps, and raising embankments for this future capital of an empire. Louis XIV had only to let certain Frenchmen settle on these less forbidding coasts, that might soon have become the capital of as fruitful a province as Peter the Great's; and the transformation would have been made, as in New England, without any assistance from the king except perhaps for defense.

It is due the memory of Iberville, often slandered as was La Salle before him, not that the story of his all but hopeless struggles should be repeated here but that the object toward which he so valiantly struggled should be clearly seen. He had read Father Membre's account of the La Salle voyage of discovery and Joutel's story of the last expedition. He had even had a conversation with La Salle, and had heard his own lips describe the river; and he had known Tonty of the Iron Hand, faithful to the last. Iberville had a mind capable of entertaining the vision, and he had a spirit capable of following it. He seems to have been for a time after La Salle's death his only great-minded follower. He wrote on reaching Rochelle after his first voyage that "if France does not immediately seize this part of America, which is the most beautiful, and establish a colony strong enough to resist any which England may have here, the English colonies (already considerable in Carolina) will so thrive that in less than a hundred years they will be strong enough to seize all America."*

(* Margry, l. c., IV:322.)

But the answer from Versailles only hastened the fulfilment of Iberville's prophecy. It is as a page torn from a contemporaneous suburban villa prospectus that speaks of one of those migratory settlements of Iberville on the shores of the gulf as a "terrestrial paradise," a "Pomona," or "The Fortunate Island." And the reality which confronts the home seeker is usually more nearly true to the idealistic details than that which Governor Cadillac, wishing no doubt to discredit his predecessor, reported when he went to succeed Bienville for a time as governor: "I have seen the garden on Dauphin Island, which had been described to me as a terrestrial paradise. I saw there three seedling pear-trees, three seedling apple- trees, a little plum-tree about three feet high, with seven bad plums on it, a vine some thirty feet long, with nine bunches of grapes, some of them withered, or rotten, and some partly ripe, about forty plants of French melons and a few pumpkins."*

(* Parkman, "A Half Century of Conflict," 1:309.)

Bienville, the brother, also deserves remembrance both in France and America--dismissed once but exonerated, returning later to succeed the pessimistic Cadillac and to lay the foundations of New Orleans on the only dry spot he had found on his first journey up the river, there to plant the seed of the fruits and melons and pumpkins of the garden on Dauphin Island, that were to bring forth millionfold, though they have not yet entirely crowded out the cypress and the palmetto, and the fleur-de-lis that still grows wild and flowers brilliantly at certain seasons.

It was some time before this, however, that the king, nearing the end of his days, vexed with his wars, tired of his expensive and unproductive venture, gave over the colony into the hands and enterprise of a speculator, one Antoine Crozat, a French merchant whose purse had been open to Louis for his wars. There was a total population at this juncture (1712) of three hundred and eighty souls, about one half of whom were "in the king's pay." Crozat, the king's deputy despot, finds no better fortune than the king, and soon (1717) resigns his charter, to be succeeded in his anxieties and privileges by that famous Scotch adventurer John Law, who organized the Mississippi Company in order to enjoy the varied monopolies assembled in its charter--monopolies which would make any inhabitant of that trust-hating valley to-day fume in denouncing. It was a tobacco trust, a coinage trust, a revenue trust, a slave-holding trust, a mining trust, a trade trust wrapped in one, with an unlimited license. It was, moreover, a conscience trust, a speech trust, a religion trust, a race trust. It was, in short, the ultimate, sublimated expression of a monopolistic theory made effective in a charter. Immigration, within these restrictions, was not likely to be voluntary and eager, as was the case in New England, and, since the company was under the one compulsion of providing a certain number of colonists and slaves, immigration was forced. Every conceivable sound economic and philosophical principle was violated, and yet investors came from all parts of Europe. "Crowds of crazed speculators jostled and fought each other" before the offices of the company in the Rue Quincampoix* from morning till night to get their names inscribed among the stockholders, and, though five hundred thousand foreigners were attracted to Paris by opportunities for speculation, scarcely a colonist went willingly to the Eldorado of the company, whose stock was capitalized in billions and "whose ingots of gold were displayed in Paris shop-windows." There were maps of that valley to be found in abundance in Paris in those days with mines indicated on them indiscriminately. When the bubble burst, Louisiana "became a name of disgust and terror" in Europe, and doubtless thousands hoped never to hear the word "Mississippi" again, and yet it was only time that was needed to make even such wild prophecies true.

(* A now disreputable street, or so it seemed as I walked through it one day in the dusk.)

The monopolistic venture failed. Many of the colonists whom the company entered died or ran away; millions of pounds had been spent, there was no return, and there was little tangible to show for it all--a few thousand white settlers, many of whom, in a phrase current to-day in the States, were "undesirable citizens," living in palisaded cabins. So the little settlement became a crown colony again and came back to the king, but not to him in whose name it had been originally taken, for that king was dead. Louis XIV's name, kept in "Louisiana," claims now but a fragment of that vast territory which might have been his forever. The little outcast colony was laid on the steps of Versailles again, and was again subject to "paternalistic nursing," because of or in despite of which it began at last to show signs of growth. It was at the cost of a half-century of time, of eight or more millions of livres to the king, Crozat and the company, of millions upon millions more to those who bought the worthless stock of the Mississippi Company, and of ignominy and shame, that La Salle's dream began to have realization, while on the Atlantic seaboard the English colonies were growing luxuriantly in comparative neglect.

Meanwhile French explorers were traversing this mighty interior valley with all the spirit of Cartier, Joliet, Champlain, and La Salle. Pierre Charles le Sueur had ascended the Mississippi far toward its source in search of copper and lead. Bernard de la Harpe and Louis Juchereau, the Sieur de St. Denis, explored the Red River and penetrated as far as the Spanish settlement of St. Jean Baptiste on the Rio Grande. Each might have a volume. The turbid Missouri even (which Marquette and Joliet first saw heading great trees down into the Mississippi) was not passed by as impervious to the hardihood of undaunted, amphibious geographers such as La Harpe and Du Tisne.

Two brothers, Pierre and Paul Mallet, penetrated to the old Spanish settlement at Santa Fe and may have been the first of Frenchmen to see the farther boundary of the valley, the Rocky Mountains. Whether they did or not, it is certain that far to the northwest two other brothers did reach that mighty range and "discovered that part of it to which the name Rocky Mountains properly belongs."

The brothers La Verendrye in 1735, two centuries after Cartier, were still looking for a way to the western sea (Mer de l'Ouest). With their father these sons ventured their lives and gave their fortunes to the exploration of the northwest out beyond Lake Superior, out past the ranch where a century and a half later President Roosevelt wrote the "Winning of the West," out to or beyond the edge of what is now the great Yellowstone National Park, anticipating by more than sixty years the first stages of the famous Lewis and Clark expedition. The snow covered the peaks of the Big Horn Mountains, but the party probably forced a way to the Wind River Range before they reluctantly turned back from the foot of the mountains, disappointedly fancying that they might have seen the Pacific if they could have reached the summits.

It is not far from the place where they began their homeward journey that I have seen two trickling streams, within a few yards of each other, start, one toward the gulf and one toward the Pacific--but the latter had seven or eight hundred miles of mountain and forest to pass before it could touch what the Verendrye brothers hoped to see. Yet, though they, as Cartier, Champlain, Nicolet, La Salle, and scores of others did not find the way to the western sea, their unappreciated, heroic efforts made at their own expense stretched the line of French forts all the way across the valley from sea to mountain range, completing, as one historian has represented it, a T, but as it seems to me rather a cross, with a perpendicular column reaching from the gulf to Hudson's Bay, and its transverse strip from the Big Horn Mountains to Cape Breton. Or so it stood for a day in the world's history, raised by unspeakable suffering, a vision once seen never to be forgotten.

Chevalier de la Verendrye, who had seen, first of white men, the snow- capped mountains, "sank into poverty and neglect," and finally perished in the shipwreck off the island of Cape Breton. So was the whole east and west line of French pioneering retraced and extended in the life of one hardy French family.*

(* Parkman, "The Discovery of the Rocky Mountains," in Atlantic Monthly, 61:783-793. "A Half Century of Conflict," 2:4-43. Thwaites, "A Brief History of Rocky Mountain Exploration," pp. 26-36.)

And as to the north and south line, every year saw its foundations and strength increase as if it were a a growing tree. Along the Mississippi, forts were planted and Jesuit and Sulpician missions grew. The Illinois country enjoyed a "boom," as we say in America, even in those days, and became known for a time as the Garden of New France; but only for a time, for it was so easy to earn a livelihood there that it was not long before the habitants reverted, under temptation, to the preagricultural, hunting state after giving a moment's prophecy of the stirring life that was some day to make it the garden of the new world, the busiest spot in the busy world.

There are glimpses here and there of gayety and halcyon days that give brightness to the story so full of tragedy. There was in the very heart of the valley (near the site of St. Louis, where a great world's fair was held a few years ago), Fort Chartres, mentioned above, "the centre of life and fashion in the West" as well as "a bulwark against Spain and a barrier to England."* But in time the Indians, stirred by the English rivalry, swarmed as well as mosquitoes about the place, and there were battles, the echoes of which are still heard, we are told, in the regions south of St. Louis even in Our days. A young French officer, the Chevalier d'Artaguette, captured by the Chickasaws, was burned at the stake. He and his kin were loved by all the French and the song they used to sing of him is kept in a negro melody whose "oft-repeated chorus" ran:

"In the days of D'Artaguette,
He! Ho! He!
It was the good old time.
The world was led straight with a switch,
He! Ho! He!
Then there were no negroes, no ribbons,
No diamonds
For the vulgar.
He! Ho! He!"

(* See Edward G. Mason, "Old Fort Chartres," in his "Chapters from Illinois History," 1901.)

And here even in this remote place premonitions of the great and imminent struggle with the English are ominously heard. We hear the governor- general of Canada, the Marquis de la Galissonniere, asking the home government in France not to leave the little colony of Illinois to perish --not for its own sake, but "else Canada and Louisiana would fall apart"; still urging, moreover, the value for fabrics of the wool of buffaloes, which roam the prairies in innumerable multitudes, the readiness of the earth for the plough, and the availability of the buffalo as a domestic animal. "If caught and attached to a plough," says the governor, who spoke truthfully but with little knowledge of this wild animal, "it would move it at a speed superior to that of the domestic ox." I do not know how appealing this harnessing of the original motive power of the prairie to the uses of agriculture was, and it is not of importance now. The buffalo has long since gone. Even the ox and the Norman horse, so long in use there, have been largely supplanted by that mysterious force, electricity, which Franklin was discovering on the other side of the Alleghany Mountains at the very time that this suggestion was being made to the minister of Louis XV. It is known, however, that the king took thought of the little Illinois colony, for the fort of wood was transformed under the direction of Chevalier de Macarty into a fortress of stone and garrisoned by nearly a regiment of French troops. A million crowns it cost the king, but this could not have distressed his Majesty, engaged in "throwing dice with piles of Louis d'or before him" and princes about him.

This was in the early fifties, and the fort was hardly transformed before the rifles of George Washington's men were heard from the eastern barriers disputing the claim of the French to the Ohio country. Jumonville, who was slain among the rocks of the Laurel Mountains, in the Alleghanies (killed in the opening skirmish of the final struggle), had a young brother, Neyon de Villiers, a captain in Chevalier de Macarty's garrison at Fort Chartres; and eastward he hastened, up the Ohio, to avenge his brother's death. "M. de Wachenston" (as the name appears in French despatches) was driven back, and so the "Old French War" in America began.

It was from this mid-continent fortress and its fertile environs that help in arms and rations went to the support of that final struggle along the mountains and lakes, even as far as La Salle's old Fort Niagara, where the valiant Aubry, at the head of his Illinois expedition, fell covered with wounds and many of his men were killed or taken prisoners. That was about all that one in the interior of the valley heard of the battles of the Seven Years' War out upon its edges.

What gives peculiar interest in this fortress to us to-day is that it was for a little time the only place in North America where the flag of the French was flying. All New France had been ceded by the treaty of Paris in 1763, but the little garrison of forty men still held Fort Chartres. Pontiac and other friendly Indians intercepted all approaching English forces till, in 1765 (two years after the treaty of Paris and the cession of Canada and all the valley east of the Mississippi), St. Ange, the commander, announced to Pontiac, friendly to the end, that all was over, that "Onontio, their great French father," could no longer help his red children, that he was beyond the sea and could not hear, and that he, Pontiac, must make peace with the English. Then it was that the forty- second Highlanders, the "Black Watch," were permitted to enter the fort and to put the red cross of St. George in place of the fleur-de-lis. And so it was at Fort Chartres that the mighty struggle ended and that the titular life of the great empire of France in the new world actually went out.

The river, seemingly sentient, and still French, as I have said, soon swept away the site of the village outside the fort; and when the English had begun to look upon this as their permanent headquarters in the northwest--this fort, which Captain Pittman had reported to be the best- built fort in America--the still hostile river rose one night, and with its "resistless flood" tore away a bastion and a part of the river wall, then moved its channel away, and left the fort a mile inland.

The magazine still stands, or did a little time ago when I visited the site and found it nearly hidden by the trees, bushes, and weeds--all that is visibly left of the old French domain--and not far away, hidden at the foot of a hill, lies, as I have said, the village of Prairie du Rocher, "a little piece of old France transplanted to the Mississippi" a century and a half ago and forgotten.

It was on Champlain's cliff and beneath Cartier's Mount Royal that the unequal contest for the possession of America ended, where it began--a contest whose story, as Parkman says, in a sense demeaning his own great contribution, "would have been a history, if faults of constitution and the bigotry and folly of rulers had not dwarfed it to an episode." But if it was an episode to the New Englander, or even to Frenchmen at the distance in time at which I write, it rises to the importance of history out in that region of America, where a century of unexampled fortitude needs rather an epic poet than a historian to give it its place in the world's consciousness.

Indeed, historians of the United States to-day, as well as statesmen of that time, are in substantial agreement in this: That the presence of the French on all the colonial borders compelled a confederation of the varying interests of the several English colonies, kept them penned in between the mountains and the sea until there had been developed some degree of solidarity, some ability to act together; and then by the sudden, if compulsory, withdrawal of the pressure not only allowed their expansion but relieved them of all need of help from England and so of dependence upon her.

"We have caught them at last," said Louis XV's minister, Choiseul, speaking of the treaty of Paris in 1763.* Burke** prophesied that the removal of France from North America would precipitate, as it did, the division of the British Empire. And Richard Henry Greene, the great English historian, dates the foundation of the great independent republic of the west (the United States) from the triumph of Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham.

(* Bancroft, "History of the United States," 4:460.)
(* * William Burke, "Remarks on the Letter Addressed to Two Great Men.")

It is interesting testimony in support of this fear of the eventual loss of all the colonies in such a cession, or such an acceptance, that the English commissioners debated long whether it might be more profitable to retain the little island of Guadeloupe instead of all New France. And it would appear that except for the advice of Benjamin Franklin this substitution would probably have been made.

France, then, having borne the brunt of conflict with nature and the natives in that valley, having revealed the riches of that valley to the world, having consecrated its entire length and breadth by high valor and sacrifice, having possessed that valley practically to the very eve of the birth of the nation that now occupies it, and having helped by substantial aid the struggling colonies to their independence, deserves (not through her monarchs or ministers chiefly, but through the new-world pioneers, who gave illustration of the spirit and stuff of Frenchmen) a lasting and a large share of credit for the establishment of the republic which has its most vigorous life in that valley.

New France has passed and New England, too, but in their stead the new republic, recruited from all nations under heaven, ties their lost dominions into a power which is immensely greater than the sum of the two could have been, greater than it could have been in the hands of either alone.

There was for a little time a dream of the revival of New France out beyond the Mississippi, for there was a vast part of that valley that did not pass to England in 1763. The great territory between the Mississippi and the mountains, whose "snow-encumbered" peaks the Verendrye brothers had so longingly looked upon, was abandoned to Spain, or rather thrust upon Spain, already claiming it. France wanted to give it to England in order that Florida might be saved to Spain, her ally, but England did not hesitate as she did in making choice between the eastern half of the valley and Guadeloupe. She declined. So with an apparent magnanimity, which is greatly to be discounted when we come to know how worthless even the people of the United States, years later, considered this trans- Mississippi country, France, "secretly tired of her colony," finally induced Spain to accept it. The Spanish monarch, as if making the best of a bad bargain, took it with many excuses for his seemingly poor judgment.

But though Louis's minister, Choiseul, chuckled outwardly over the embarrassment to England of his compulsory cession of Canada, New France, Illinois, and Louisiana (instead of Guadeloupe) and made a show of magnanimity in thrusting the other half of the Mississippi upon Spain, and though Turgot's simile between colonies and ripe fruit was often repeated for justification and consolation, the loss of these possessions was undoubtedly keenly felt and the dream of their recovery cherished; at any rate, the recovery of that part which lay beyond the Mississippi.

But that possession had become more precious to the sovereign of Spain, who refused the proffers that France was able to make in the next thirty years. The dream of repossession became fonder to the French republic. Talleyrand, who had spent a year in travel in the United States, urged the acquisition not merely for France's own sake but to curb the ambitions of the Americans, "whose conduct ever since the moment of their independence is enough to prove this truth: the Americans are devoured by pride, ambition, and cupidity."

"There are," he said, "no other means of putting an end to the ambition of the Americans than that of shutting them up within the limits which nature seems to have traced for them; but Spain is not in a condition to do this great work alone. She cannot, therefore, hasten too quickly to engage the aid of a preponderating power, yielding to it a small part of her immense domains in order to preserve the rest."

"Let the court of Madrid cede these districts to France and from that moment the power of America is bounded by the limit which it may suit the interests and the tranquillity of France and Spain to assign her. The French Republic ... will be a wall of brass forever impenetrable to the combined efforts of England and America."*

(* Quoted in Henry Adams's "History of the United States," 1:357.)

If in Napoleon's mind the dream was as sinister, as regards the United States, it was not so for long. It contemplated at first the occupation of Santo Domingo, the quelling of the insurrection there, then the seizure of Louisiana, already promised to France by Spain, then the acquisition of Florida, the conversion of the Gulf of Mexico into a French lake, and ultimately the extension of the province of Louisiana to the Alleghanies and, perhaps, even to the old borders of New France along the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence. But plague and slaughter met his armies in Santo Domingo in the first step toward the realization of his vast design, and the vision, in the shifting light of events in Europe and on the shores of America as well, soon assumed other shape and color and at last disappeared entirely, supplanted by the vision of a strengthened American republic that would come to be a rival of England. This was what came (in his own language) instead of his dream of a New France beyond the Mississippi, beyond the American republic:

"I know the full value of Louisiana, and I have been desirous of repairing the fault of the French negotiator who abandoned it in 1763. A few lines of a treaty have restored it to me, and I have scarcely recovered it when I must expect to lose it. But if it escapes from me, it shall one day cost dearer to those who oblige me to strip myself of it than to those to whom I wish to deliver it. The English have successfully taken from France, Canada, Cape Breton, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and the richest portions of Asia. They are engaged in exciting troubles in St. Domingo. They shall not have the Mississippi which they covet. Louisiana is nothing in comparison with their conquests in all parts of the globe, and yet the jealousy they feel at the restoration of this colony to the sovereignty of France acquaints me with their wish to take possession of it, and it is thus that they will begin the war.... I think of ceding it to the United States. I can scarcely say that I cede it to them, for it is not yet in our possession. If, however, I leave the least time to our enemies, I shall only transmit an empty title to those republicans whose friendship I seek. They only ask of me one town in Louisiana, but I already consider the colony as entirely lost, and it appears to me that in the hands of this growing power, it will be more useful to the policy and even to the commerce of France than if I should attempt to keep it."*

(* Marbois, "History of Louisiana," pp. 263-264.)

The United States Commissioner came one day to Paris to purchase New Orleans, and he went back to America with a deed to more than 800,000 square miles of the region which La Salle had claimed for Louis XIV by virtue of the commission which he carried in his bosom from the Rue de la Truanderie more than a century before:

"The First Consul of the French Republic, desiring to give to the United States a strong proof of friendship, doth hereby cede to the said United States, in the name of the French Republic, forever and in full sovereignty, the said territory, with all its rights and appurtenances, as fully and in the same manner as they might have been acquired by the French Republic."*

(* Treaty of Purchase between the United States and the French Republic, Art. I.)

The dream faded into something undefined but greater, relieving Napoleon and France of immediate dangers and promising more to humanity, we must agree, than a colony administered at that distance and separated from a young, growing nation merely by a shifting river that must inevitably have made trouble instead of preventing it.

Whatever may be said of Napoleon's motives or compulsions in this matter or of his service to mankind in others, he has been "useful to the universe," not in preventing England from ruling in that valley and so dominating America, but in making it possible for the United States to undertake the greatest task ever given into the hands of a republic, and at the same time enabling it to keep the good-will of that people who might (if the other dream had been realized) have become the worst of her enemies. It was Napoleon, whatever his motive, Napoleon in the name of the French people, who gave the United States the possibility of becoming a world-power.