Two years later, Schoolcraft started again, and, after a successful voyage up the great river, he arrived at Cass Lake, the most northerly point reached by the predecessor who had given his name to that now famous sheet of water. Here the real difficulties of the expedition began. The Mississippi branched out into two forks, one of which—the eastern—was followed to its source in Lake Ussawa, whence an arduous tramp, or rather paddle, across country brought the party, first to the lofty ridge known as the Hauteur des Ferres, separating the tributaries of the River de Corbeau from those of the Red River, and then in sight of the western and main branch of the Father of Waters.
A number of sandy elevations had still to be scaled before the explorers once more stood upon the shores of the Mississippi, but on issuing from “a thicket into a small weedy opening,” the goal of the journey suddenly burst upon them. Itasca Lake, the primal home of the western branch of the mighty river, lay stretched before them, and the last link in the chain of discovery connected with the longest water highway in the world was found.
Itasca Lake, the Lac la Biche of the early French explorers, is a beautiful sheet of water some seven or eight miles in circumference, with an outlet about twelve feet wide, whence the Mississippi expands into a broad and copious stream. Its volume appeared strangely out of proportion to the size of its source, till the presence of invisible subterranean springs, such as those near the African Lake Tanganyika, was ascertained.
A thorough exploration of Lake Itasca was succeeded by a perilous voyage down a series of rapids forming the first stage of the Mississippi’s journey to the ocean; but, after many a narrow escape, the canoes floated into the broad stream, flanked on either side by prairies, into which the river widens above Lake Cass, whence the trip to Lake Superior lay through districts already well known.
CHAPTER XIV.
DISCOVERY OF THE GREAT BASIN, WITH THE SALT LAKE OF UTAH, AND JOURNEY ACROSS THE SIERRA NEVADA TO CALIFORNIA.
DURING the first years of the present century, the tide alike of emigration and exploration had set toward the northern territories of the United States. The discovery of the sources of the Mississippi and of those of its chief affluents, however, left little more to be done in that direction, and, in 1838, a new chapter in the history of modern American geography was ushered in by the sending out of a naval exploring expedition, under Captain Wilkes, with orders to make surveys along the western coast, especially of the bay now known as that of San Francisco.
On the arrival of Wilkes at Yerba Buena, as what has since become the gate of the Pacific was then called, the town consisted merely of a large frame building occupied by an agent of the Hudson’s Bay Company, a store kept by an American, a billiard room and bar, a poop cabin of a ship used as a residence by a captain, a blacksmith’s shop, and a few sheds, all of which had sprung up at intervals since California, deserted, as related above, by its early colonists, had become the prey of trappers, miners, and other adventurers of various nationalities.
The most prominent man then in California was a Swiss named Sutter, who had bought of the Mexican Government a tract of land thirty leagues square, and was now employed in laying it out under the imposing name of New Helvetia. He had already built a fort near the junction of the Sacramento and American rivers to which he had given his own name, little dreaming that the discovery of gold close at hand would shortly make that name world-famous, as the most powerful emigration magnet of the day.