At eight o'clock, Captain Glazier, accompanied by Judge Albert Todd, an eminent lawyer, and vice-president of the Historical Society, made his appearance on the platform, and, after the storm of applause which greeted their entry had subsided, Judge Todd stepped to the front and introduced the lecturer in the following terms:—
Mark Twain wrote that in his oriental travels he visited the grave of our common ancestor, Adam, and as a filial mourner he copiously wept over it. To me, the grave of our common ancestress, Eve, would be more worthy of my filial affection; but instead of weeping over it, I should proudly rejoice by reason of her irrepressible desire for knowledge. She boldly gratified this desire, and thereby lifted Adam up from the indolent, browsing life that he seemed disposed and content to pass in the "Garden," and gave birth to that spirit of inquiry and investigation which is developing and elevating their posterity to "man's pride of place"—"a little lower than the angels," by keeping them ever discontented with the status quo, and constantly pressing on to the "mark of their high calling" beneath the blazing legend "Excelsior." It is the ceaseless unrest of the spirit, one of the greatest evidences of the soul's immortality, that is continually contracting the boundaries of the unknown in geography and astronomy, in physics and metaphysics, in all their varied departments. Of those pre-eminently illustrating it in geography were Jason and his Argonauts; Columbus, De Gama and Magellan; De Soto, Marquette and La Salle; Cabot and Cook; Speke, Baker, Livingstone and Franklin; and our own Ledyard, Lewis, Clarke, Kane, Hall and Stanley. And this evening will appear before you another of these irrepressible discontents who would know what is still hidden at any risk or privation.
Impelled by this spirit of enterprise in search of Truth, Captain Willard Glazier has discovered, at last, the true source of our grand and peerless river, the "Father of Waters," down which he has floated and paddled in frail canoes, a distance of more than three thousand miles, to its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico. One of these canoes is now placed here in your view, and will be presented to-night by its navigator to our Historical Society.
Nearly two hundred years ago La Salle discovered the mouth of the Mississippi, yet only now in this year of grace, 1881, was ascertained its true fountain source.
This, the latest achievement of Captain Glazier, is only in the natural course of his antecedents. Born as late as 1841, he has already gone through the experiences of the Adamic labors of a tiller of the soil, the hard toils of the student and of the successful teacher; of the dashing and brilliant cavalry officer in the Union army through the whole period of our late war, from its disastrous beginning to its successful ending; of the sufferings of capture and imprisonment in the notorious "Libby" and other prisons, and of a daring and perilous escape from their cruel walls; of an adventurous tourist on horseback through the most civilized and savage portions of our continent, beginning with the feet of his horse in the waters of the Atlantic, and ending with their splash in the waters of the Pacific. He delivered lectures along his route wherever a civilized audience could be collected, and suffered capture by the Indians, with all its sensational romance and hideous prospects.
From the material of these antecedents he has written and published several books of singular interest and national value.
From this brief sketch we would naturally expect to see a stalwart man, massive and powerful in form and muscle. Our conception of men of big deeds is that they also are big. But David was a stripling when he slew Goliath of Gath. Napoleon was characterized by the society ladies of the period of his early career as "Puss in Boots." Our own Fremont and Eads would seem at sight capable of only the ordinarily exposed duties of life. Of like physique is the subject of this introduction.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is now my pleasant privilege to introduce to your acquaintance Captain Willard Glazier as the lecturer for the evening.
At the close of Judge Todd's introduction, Captain Glazier began his instructive historic lecture on the "Pioneers of the Mississippi," holding the attention of all present by the interest of his subject and the eloquence of his delivery. Beginning with De Soto, the discoverer of the Great River, he gave an account of his early life and adventures, of his ambition to found an empire like that of Cortez, and of his arrival at the mighty stream in whose waters he soon found his final resting-place.