LA SALLE PRESENTING A PETITION TO KING LOUIS XIV
For many years this warfare was hedged in, because mountains, woods, and savages filled up a broad belt of territory between the English coast settlements and the St. Lawrence. But in war, as in the chivalric game of football, when you cannot break through the center, you play round the ends. Hence in every one of the six regular wars, besides various local squabbles, there was always fighting between French and English in Nova Scotia, or the Islands of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, or along that river. In 1613 the English captured Port Royal on the Bay of Fundy, and again in 1690 and 1710,—it became almost a habit,—in 1670 they broke into Hudson Bay; in 1745 and 1758 they mastered Louisburg; and in 1759 took Quebec.
LA SALLE
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.
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!