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.’