The voyagers visited the Natchez Indians, near the
site of the present city of that name, where they
found a ’religious and political despotism,
a privileged class descended from the sun, a temple
and a sacred fire.’ It must have been like
getting home again; it was home with an advantage,
in fact, for it lacked Louis XIV.
A few more days swept swiftly by, and La Salle stood
in the shadow of his confiscating cross, at the meeting
of the waters from Delaware, and from Itaska, and
from the mountain ranges close upon the Pacific, with
the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, his task finished,
his prodigy achieved. Mr. Parkman, in closing
his fascinating narrative, thus sums up:
’On that day, the realm of France received on
parchment a stupendous accession. The fertile
plains of Texas; the vast basin of the Mississippi,
from its frozen northern springs to the sultry borders
of the Gulf; from the woody ridges of the Alleghanies
to the bare peaks of the Rocky Mountains—a
region of savannas and forests, sun-cracked deserts
and grassy prairies, watered by a thousand rivers,
ranged by a thousand warlike tribes, passed beneath
the scepter of the Sultan of Versailles; and all by
virtue of a feeble human voice, inaudible at half
a mile.’
Apparently the river was ready for business,
now. But no, the distribution of a population
along its banks was as calm and deliberate and time-devouring
a process as the discovery and exploration had been.
Seventy years elapsed, after the exploration, before
the river’s borders had a white population worth
considering; and nearly fifty more before the river
had a commerce. Between La Salle’s opening
of the river and the time when it may be said to have
become the vehicle of anything like a regular and
active commerce, seven sovereigns had occupied the
throne of England, America had become an independent
nation, Louis XIV. and Louis XV. had rotted and died,
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. Truly, there were
snails in those days.
The river’s earliest commerce was in great barges—keelboats,
broadhorns. They floated and sailed from the upper
rivers to New Orleans, changed cargoes there, and
were tediously warped and poled back by hand.
A voyage down and back sometimes occupied nine months.
In time this commerce increased until it gave employment
to hordes of rough and hardy men; rude, uneducated,
brave, suffering terrific hardships with sailor-like
stoicism; heavy drinkers, coarse frolickers in moral
sties like the Natchez-under-the-hill of that day,
heavy fighters, reckless fellows, every one, elephantinely
jolly, foul-witted, profane; prodigal of their money,
bankrupt at the end of the trip, fond of barbaric
finery, prodigious braggarts; yet, in the main, honest,
trustworthy, faithful to promises and duty, and often
picturesquely magnanimous.
