Harper's Round Table, December 31, 1895

Copyright, 1895, by Harper & Brothers. All Rights Reserved.

In early times America was to the Spaniards a region of silver and gold, which were to be wrung from the natives and squandered in Europe; to the French and the Dutch it was a country of furs, which were to be purchased from the Indians for beads, knives, and guns, and sold across the sea at an enormous profit; to the English it was a land of homes, with liberty to think and act. Thus, while the Spaniards were delving in the mines of Mexico and Peru and freighting their argosies, and while the French couriers of the woods were steering their fur-laden canoes down the St. Lawrence, the English colonists along the Atlantic coast were cultivating the soil, making and enforcing laws, and gaining a foothold which was to remain firm long after their more restless and adventurous neighbors had vanished from the New World.
Nevertheless, the early French explorers, heedless of danger, bold and free as the Indians themselves, threading rivers and exploring lakes in their canoes, ranging through limitless solitudes of forest or over interminable wastes of prairie, performed a service of the utmost value to the future nation. They mapped out the road which slower but surer feet were to follow, and if they could not organize and hold the enormous territory which they claimed, at least they prepared it for those who could.
Above the crowd of ragged and fearless adventurers who throng through the history of France's vain endeavors to found an empire in the Western World, the figure of Réné-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, towers like a statue of bronze. He was born in 1643, and was the son of a rich merchant of Rouen. A brief connection with the religious order of the Jesuits deprived him of his inheritance, and at the age of twenty-two he sailed for Canada to seek his fortune, turning his back upon the Old World, as did many another young Frenchman of gentle breeding at that time.
He was granted an estate, afterward named La Chine, near Montreal. The name of the place is a memory of the belief, long cherished by the French, that by way of the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi, a passage to the Pacific Ocean and the wealth of the East might be found. On his domain, which served as an outpost of Montreal against the incursions of the ferocious Iroquois, he lived a life of rude freedom, ruling like a young seigneur over the tenants who gathered about his stockade.