The most gallant figure in this century and a half is the chevalier
Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, who had all the pluck and endurance
of his Norman ancestors. He was educated by the Jesuits; but preferred
the life of a seignior on the frontier of Canada. There he heard tales
of a river starting somewhere near the Great Lakes and following so
long a course that he guessed it must be the Colorado. From that time
he became a still hunter for the Mississippi River. He built the
Griffin, the first vessel ever seen on Lake Erie. Apparently he found
the Ohio, and decided that that was not the advertised stream; and
before he could get to the Mississippi it had been discovered by the
priest Marquette and the Indian trader Joliet, while Father Hennepin
went up the great stream to the falls.
[Illustration: NIAGARA FALLS
_As pictured by Father Louis Hennepin, probably the first white man
to see this wonderful waterfall. From a plate made from the original
Utrecht edition of 1697._]
La Salle had larger plans than to see new countries and float on
strange rivers: he wanted to occupy that region for his sovereign and
friend, Louis XIV, Le Grand Monarque. Early in 1682 he reached what
the recorder of that expedition calls “the divine river, called by the
Indians Checagou.” With him was that picturesque figure Tonti, “the man
with the iron hand”--and his artificial member was no tougher and more
enduring than his iron heart.
February 6, 1682, the expedition reached what they called “the River
Colbert,” and six leagues lower they passed the mouth of the Missouri.
There they registered the first protest against the St. Louis water
supply; for that stream, they said, “is full as large as the River
Colbert, into which it empties, troubling it so that from the mouth
the water is hardly drinkable.” The Indians entertained him with the
fiction that by going up the Missouri ten or twelve days he would come
to a mountain, beyond which was the sea with many ships.
La Salle was the man who put the French into the Mississippi Valley,
and thus gave them possession of the two finest regions in North
America,--the whole watershed of the St. Lawrence, including the Great
Lakes, and the whole watershed of the Mississippi. How many different
craft have followed after his canoes,--a keel boat containing Aaron
Burr and his misfortunes; a flat boat, with Abraham Lincoln stretching
his long arms over the steering oar; the Belle of St. Louis racing the
Belle of Memphis, cramming sugar and hams into the furnace, and, just
as she pulled abreast of her rival, blowing up in most spectacular
style; and Porter’s gunboats, driving past Vicksburg and exchanging
broadsides with the batteries on the heights! Little did La Salle know
that he was opening up a highway for a nation not yet born!