Soto and the Mississippi—The Gate to the Wilderness—The Voyageur—Champlain to Mackinaw—Pandemonium of Wars—Down the Mississippi to Soto's Grave—Louisiana—La Salle and His Death—Coureurs de Bois—First Sight of the Northern Rockies—Where Rolls the Oregon—The American Revolution.

While Coronado was striving from the direction of Mexico to reach the mirage-like cities of Quivira, which the deceitful Turk asserted were somewhere eastward of the Rio Grande, and in search of which he arrived in some locality not many miles from the present site of Kansas City,[49] another Spaniard, whose name is better known, not for greater deeds, but because the country he traversed is more familiar, and because of his romantic burial at night beneath the turbid flood he had been second to discover, was marching and fighting towards the great river so permanently linked with his name. This was Hernando de Soto, who, in 1539, had landed with a large force at Tampa Bay for the purpose of conquering and appropriating to his heart's desire all of Florida, a realm comprising then the whole continent east of the River of Palms, now the Rio Grande. His cruelties to the natives were frightful, and as he wandered he left a trail of mingled Spanish and native blood, which at length led him, in 1541, to the Mississippi, where he crossed some distance above the mouth of the Arkansas. Near Tampa he had captured a white man, a survivor of the Narvaez party, who had been preserved among the natives by the intercession of a chief's daughter, and this Juan Ortiz should have been a reminder of the fate of Narvaez, a fate largely due to imprudence, bad management, and a disregard for the rights of natives; but it seems to have conveyed no warning.

Continuing his harsh career into the Wilderness as far as what is now central Arkansas, he turned south and passed the winter of 1541-42 in north-western Louisiana, or south-western Arkansas. Coronado spent this same winter at Tiguex, on the Rio Grande, where the inhabitants declared the Spaniards had no regard for friendship or their pledged word. In the spring Soto went down to the mouth of Red River. There his health failed. He died, and his followers, to prevent the natives from finding his grave, buried him in the deep water of the river. The command fell to Moscoso de Alvarado, who now led the company again westward, hoping to come to Spanish settlements, but when he arrived in Texas at the upper part of Trinity River he abandoned the attempt and returned to the Mississippi.

He had probably been within less than two hundred miles of the place where Coronado, about the same time, sent his army back. They had rumours of the presence of Coronado, but the nature of the country was so forbidding they feared to proceed. Moscoso was even more brutal than Soto. He punished natives by cutting off their noses and their right hands; or, by another method not unusual with the early Spaniards, setting hungry dogs on a victim to tear him to pieces before their eyes. At last this remnant of the expedition, that had started with high hopes, succeeded in building boats with which they descended the Mississippi and coasted westward, reaching the province of Panuco, in north-eastern Mexico. A great deal of misery and death had been brought to the people of the new land, but, aside from ground for an additional Spanish claim, little more had been accomplished by this than by the Narvaez expedition.

Although the Spaniards opposed vigorously the coming to the New World of any other people, New Spain soon found a rival in New France, and then in New England. Cortez had barely finished the overthrow of the Aztecs before Verrazano, for the French King, cruised along the Atlantic coast from Hatteras northward to where French fishermen already had been, and where Cartier in 1534, ten years later, discovered the great island we call Newfoundland and his Gulf of St. Lawrence. The next year he sailed up the great river, to which he gave the same name, and thereby opened the real gate to our Wilderness; for it was by this route, and not by the south, that the best early entrance was offered, on account of the numerous closely connected lakes and waterways of various kinds. Travel in a new country is always easier by boat than by any other method, for, if there are plenty of waterways, a canoe and its cargo can be carried from the head of one stream, or lake, to the next nearest one, and so a practically continuous passage effected with quantities of goods, which otherwise could not be transported without a large number of pack-animals or waggons, and pack-animals frequently need a way cleared for them, while a waggon in a new land is often impossible. So by these waterways, numerously ramifying from the mouth of the St. Lawrence into the vast western Unknown, the Frenchmen, with the beautiful birch-bark canoe of the Amerind, whose skill they also speedily acquired, entered the Wilderness with a sailor's light-heartedness, singing their gay chansons as they paddled along; songs with little sense but much rhythm, like all the ditties sailors use for expediting their labours, which, like rowing or paddling, require to be accomplished in unison. As New France developed into Canada the voyageur became a familiar and distinct character; a creation of the New World. He was as competent with a canoe as was his Spanish brother, the vaquero, with the horse. We meet him constantly in the Wilderness, and all the waterways leading to it, his airy verses echoing through the forest till the sombre pine trees seemed more lightly to wave their drooping branches; or dying across limitless stretches of prairie, in conflict, perhaps, with the stranger notes of some Amerindian chant.

By these songs the voyageurs united the strokes of their oars or paddles, and they were often responsive, like the sailor-songs on shipboard, between one party and the other; the steersman and the rowers, or the forward and the stern oarsmen. One stanza of a voyageur's song will serve to give their character:

TRANSLATION

Cartier opened the way as far as Hochelaga, now the site of Montreal, which was soon to become the very centre of all commerce with the Wilderness. Attempts were made by the French to found settlements down the coast, and one, on St. John's River, in Florida, seemed to have some life in it till the Spaniards entrenched themselves at St. Augustine, and from there crushed the French fort and the French power in that quarter for all time. This St. Augustine of the Spaniards was the first permanent settlement of Europeans within the limits of the United States (1565), antedating by forty years OÑate's founding of his first village at San Juan, New Mexico, now marked, as previously mentioned, by the little town of Chamita.

About the time that OÑate was organising New Mexico there came over to the north-east coast one Sieur de Monts, who established Port Royal for France in a region named Acadia, lying between the Lower St. Lawrence and the Atlantic, a title later restricted to the portion now called Nova Scotia, and immortalised in Longfellow's poem, Evangeline. But it was not till the illustrious Champlain, afterwards so justly famous, founded Quebec, in 1608, that France really closed her grip on the north-eastern part of the continent; a grip that was later to be broken for ever by the British. Having permanently settled Quebec, Champlain, with his voyageurs, extended his travels westward by watercourses and lakes as far as the Straits of Mackinaw, founding many trading-posts and missions, and marking the first practicable highway to the Wilderness. He was efficiently supported in his efforts by monks of the Jesuit and Franciscan orders, brethren of those who were labouring diligently in the south-west, and who, though their energetic and sincere labours to Christianise the natives amounted to no more than a puff-ball tossed against the side of a battleship, performed a great and indispensable work in this breaking of the Wilderness.

The British also began to turn their attention to the New World, and after several explorations along the coast—Raleigh's attempt at settlement in what is now North Carolina; Davis's exploration in the Far North, where his name still remains to designate the strait he discovered—they finally founded on James River their first permanent settlement in 1607, two years after the establishment of Santa FÉ, New Mexico. To this they gave the name Jamestown, and from it as a centre they expanded their power. The French were pushing out at the North; the Spaniards controlled the South and West. Then a fourth nation appeared—the Dutch—who settled at what is now New York in 1614, five years after Hudson discovered the river now bearing his name to mark the event. Not long after this Hudson found for England the immense bay to which his name was given, and where his mutinous crew turned him, with some of his adherents, adrift on the icy sea. Never was he heard from again. Then the Mayflower came, freighted heavily with new and forceful ideas and a hardy company, who entered by Plymouth Rock; so that by 1625 all the forces that were to battle for the mastery of North America had established their footings, and with the various native tribes, who opposed their encroachment and their cruelty, they soon turned the land into a pandemonium. Almost daily the natives were given exhibitions of treachery, brutality, butchery, on the part of these newcomers among themselves, even while the good priests held aloft the crucifix and repeated, "Thou shalt not!" Is it a wonder the Amerind refused to believe? He was quick to perceive that, except the priests, the one sole object of all these warring people was pecuniary advantage. This, indeed, was rendered imperative by the European system of life.

As a rule the French were the most humane, the most just; they treated the natives more as if they might be human beings with sensitiveness and intelligence. William Penn, and his followers among the English, and the Hudson Bay Company, also dealt justly with them, but in the eyes of the others the Amerind was a beast of the forest to be exterminated. The French sent their missionaries and traders far to the West and before long had acquired a hold on the continent equal to that of the Spaniards; a hold which it then seemed impossible should ever be lessened. Raddison, the French trader, is said to have been on the head of the Mississippi as early as 1660.

Marquette and Joliet, the former a priest, the latter a trader, were sent by Frontenac, in 1673, to search for a route across the Wilderness to the Pacific by way of a great river, of which much was told by the natives. The river indicated was doubtless the Columbia. Proceeding from Michigan they finally came at the mouth of the Wisconsin to the river forming the eastern boundary of the vaster Wilderness, the Mississippi, called by Marquette Conception, and down it they went, instead of up, as they should have gone to get on the track to the Pacific, their birch-bark canoes gliding swiftly along, while the unfathomed waters for the first time heard the song of the voyageur. Down they went to Soto's burial-place. They were encroaching on the claims of the Spaniards, but boundaries then were as nebulous as the Milky Way, and the sword was the instrument of survey by which all lines were drawn. Their flag was finally carried through to the mouth of the Mississippi by that splendid character Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle,[51] a Frenchman whose qualities shine ever undimmed by the roll of fading centuries. With Tonty and Hennepin he came through the Great Lakes, and, leaving these two men behind, reached with his party the Mississippi at the mouth of the Illinois, and proceeding down it finally, in 1682, standing at the delta beside a great claim-post, he proclaimed the jurisdiction of Louis the Great (XIV.) over all this country of "Louisiana,"

They had forgotten Pineda and the unfortunate Soto and Moscoso, to say nothing of the still more unfortunate Narvaez, who was wrecked at the river's entrance. This claim certainly was broad; it covered almost everything.

La Salle had a magnificent dream of developing this enormous region for his King, and proceeding to France he came back with vessels laden with supplies and colonists. But they missed the mouth of the river. Then a series of disasters left the leader stranded, as the Narvaez survivors had been, on the coast of Texas. La Salle, of all men, surely deserved more generous treatment from Fortune. But worse was to follow. They struck out for the north-east to reach the French settlements. La Salle was ambushed and shot March 18, 1687, by a villainous member of the company, leagued with other assassins, and his body stripped and thrown to the wolves. But La Salle needed no gorgeous funeral train, no costly sepulchre to carry through the ages to come his illustrious name.

One of the assassin band, he who served as a decoy, was a youth of sixteen named l'Archeveque, who later arrived in New Mexico, lived a highly respected life there, and was eventually killed at the Pawnee village with Villazur.[52] L'Archeveque, with four others from the dismembered La Salle expedition, three young men and a girl, were found among the Tejas, two years after La Salle's murder, by Alonzo de Leon, a Spaniard who came up into Texas from Coahuila, one of the northern provinces of Mexico. He ransomed all and sent them to Mexico. Three years later, 1692, the Spaniards organised a settlement at San Antonio, and henceforth the French and Spaniards began in a hostile way to encounter each other on these wide frontiers. Iberville, in 1699, started near the mouth of the Mississippi the first permanent French settlement, and the French then rapidly spread along that river and its branches, and when the eighteenth century was fairly under way they had explored the country immediately along the Mississippi and the regions between it and Montreal; they had pushed far out into the North-west, even to the banks of the Saskatchewan. Indeed, a Frenchman is said to have reached Hudson Bay in 1656. All through these regions were beaver, bison, deer, panthers, and numerous other fur-bearing animals. The trapping of these and trading for them with the natives formed the chief incentive of the Frenchmen, just as the search for imaginary mines and fabulous cities actuated the Spaniards. The pursuit of the fur business offered a life of wild freedom, particularly fascinating to many Frenchmen, who fraternised with the natives and were able peacefully to travel from tribe to tribe, exchanging European wares for furs and other property the Amerinds had. The Amerinds welcomed these pedlars, for they wanted the goods they brought; and numbers of them ranged the forests, finally being collectively called Coureurs de Bois. They have been described as a kind of outlaw, but they were not exactly that. Their lives, knowing no restriction but their own consciences, highly elastic like almost all the consciences of that time, and perhaps this, were not always models of propriety, but they were in general probably little worse than the throat-cutting gentlemen who composed a large part of the several samples of the European nations which were striving to murder each other, and incidentally the natives, for the purpose of acquiring sole possession of everything in sight. In the perusal of the history of the development of this continent it seems almost ludicrous to describe the natives particularly as the savages. One could fill a library with volumes detailing the murderous brutality of the white race, not only in dealing with the natives, but with each other. The native was hardly more than a good second in rapine and butchery, even when he was employed by one side or the other to raise slaughter to a fine art.

In 1669 the British formed a settlement in the shape of a fur-trading post on the coast of Hudson Bay. This was the first of a series of establishments founded by "The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay," a company which, because of its masterly control, wise management, general fairness to the natives, and complete efficiency, was highly successful and of wide and long-continued influence.

As the eighteenth century opened, the French seemed to be in the lead. They claimed and controlled Canada and the greater part of the Mississippi valley, and by 1710 there were many French colonies and posts on the banks of the Mississippi. Eight years later Bienville founded New Orleans, and two after that Antoine Crozat received from the King a grant of the privilege of exclusive trade in Louisiana, a privilege which he relinquished in 1717, when it was taken by the Compagnie d'Orient, or, as it also was called, Law's Mississippi Company. It was so held for fifteen years, when it was governed as a French province. By 1722 the French had established a fort on the Missouri called Orleans, about two hundred and fifty miles above the mouth, by some authorities said to have been the result of the Spanish expedition under Villazur, which was destroyed, according to some reports, in an attempt to annihilate the Missouris, who were friendly to the French. But the Spaniards claimed that the French instigated the attack upon their 1720 expedition to the Platte; and the French, it appears, claimed that the Spanish were striving to wipe out their allies.

There were now open into the interior two great water highways, one by the St. Lawrence, the other by the Mississippi-Missouri. Transportation was almost exclusively by boat, hence the waterways were seldom departed from for any great distance, and the immense tract lying west of the Missouri and upper Mississippi was still an unknown country. From time to time rumours were repeated of a huge river which flowed towards the Sea of the West, but the traders did not always heed the tales of the natives. As early as 1716 there was a definite statement that "towards the source (of the Mississippi) there is in the highlands a river that leads to the western ocean." Whether some Frenchman had made the journey or not is unknown, but it is not improbable that a daring coureur de bois had slipped along from tribe to tribe and finally arrived at the Pacific.

In 1728 there was a trader at Lake Nipigon—Sieur de la Verendrye, a Frenchman, to whom the natives told such positive tales about this great river flowing to the Sea of the West, that he determined to explore it.[53] He laid his plans before Beauharnois, then Governor of Canada, who was favourably impressed by the story, and also by a map which Verendrye's Amerind guide had drawn for him. An expedition of fifty men was fitted out, which left Montreal in 1731 under the command of Verendrye's sons and nephew. The party seem not to have moved directly for the river they intended to examine, but spent a number of years exploring, trading, and trapping in the North-west country. Finally, in 1738, they built an advance post, Fort La Reine, on the Assiniboine, whence they continued explorations north and south. In the latter direction they ascended the Souris, or Mouse, River, and at length arrived in the country of the Mandans, on the Missouri, at the great bend to the south, in what is now North Dakota, antedating in the region Lewis and Clark by over threescore years. This was in 1738. Again in 1742 the company arrived at the Missouri under the command of the eldest son and his brother, passed the Yellowstone River, and on January 1, 1743, came in sight of the Rocky Mountains, perhaps the Big Horn range, probably the first white men to see them from this direction; that is, north of about the 38th parallel, where the Spaniards had been. They climbed these mountains, and appear to have proceeded westward, perhaps as far as Wind River, where they remained some time in the country of the Snakes, hearing of another river farther south called Karoskiou, probably the head of the Colorado, now named Green River. They were then within about two hundred miles of the point reached, twenty-three years later, by Escalante, and not much farther from the locality on Grand River arrived at in 1765 by Don Juan Maria de Ribera.

Owing to a war between the Snakes and a tribe to the southward named Arcs, they were unable to go on and returned to the upper Missouri in May, 1743, somewhere erecting a stone monument to commemorate their entrance into the region. Having done this they went to the Saskatchewan valley by way of their Fort La Reine. Jealousy of their success and changes in the governorship of Canada resulted in the overthrow of the Verendryes, but Jonquire later, coming to the head of the government, determined to profit by their investigations and planned two expeditions to the Pacific, one over the course Verendrye had pursued, and the other by the waters of the Saskatchewan. These appear to have had little success, yet some of the men reached the Rocky Mountains, and were there in 1753. The war with England then prevented further organised explorations by the French. Several accounts of the existence of a large river beginning at the head of the Missouri and flowing west to the Pacific had been given by the Amerinds, as already noted, Dupratz having heard one from a native of the Yazoo country.[54] This man said he had himself ascended the Missouri to its source and there found this other river, which he followed for some distance, wars preventing him from going through to the ocean into which he was told it entered. Several maps of about 1750 gave a supposed course of this river, which was called the Great River of the West. Jonathan Carver[55] also told of this stream, called the Oregon, in his book describing the travels he made in 1766-68 into the region of the upper Mississippi; but he did not go there.[56] The Dane, Bering, under Russian patronage, in 1741, had marked out a path to the New World from a totally different direction from any taken by the other nations; he came from the West, from Kamtchatka, by the far northern route. The Russians followed and began to explore down the North-west coast.

Having triumphed over France, Great Britain in 1763 acquired the whole of Canada, all of Louisiana east of the Mississippi except New Orleans, and the Spanish claims in Florida. They now controlled the entire continent east of the Mississippi, the Dutch having long before surrendered. France published the next year a secret cession two years before of all Louisiana west of the Mississippi to Spain, and Spain obtaining New Orleans also in 1769, France was thrown completely off the continent. In 1764, at the time France announced the cession to Spain, La Clede founded St. Louis on the site where it now stands, a settlement that henceforth became the departing point for the great Wilderness. Great Britain renounced all claim to lands south-west of the Mississippi, and the vast territory of North America was now divided between Great Britain, Spain, and Russia, the latter on the north-west, Spain on the south-west, and Great Britain on the east. Spain was endeavouring to clinch its hold on the Californian coast and the regions to northward, and several vessels were sent out in that direction. One of these, commanded by Bruno Heceta, returning from more northern shores on the evening of August 17, 1775, came to a great bay where a current was discovered setting out from the land with such power that Heceta thought he had found either some great river or some connection with another sea. The Strait of Fuca was then supposed to join the Atlantic, under the old title of the fabled Strait of Anian, and he also thought he might be at the mouth of this, although his reckoning did not agree with that of Fuca. In reality he had discovered thus vaguely the mouth of the River of the West, now the Columbia. He called the place the Bahia de la Asuncion, but later charts mark it the Inlet of Heceta, while the supposed river is put down as Rio de San Roque. Aguilar, who commanded one of Vizcaino's ships in 1603, went north of Cape Mendocino to the mouth of a great river, which he could not enter on account of the current. This was probably the Columbia. Thus from sea and land the existence of a large river in this quarter began to be understood. Owing to the line of fierce white-caps formed by the tides breaking on the great bar, extending across the mouth of this river, even now, as one views the entrance from the deck of his approaching ship, after government execution of a large amount of admirable engineering, it presents a most impracticable looking channel, the white foam appearing to form a continuous line. At low water, with a sea running, the place is still one of difficult passage, and reminds of Gray, the bold sailor who first steered through it. Heceta, however, did not hesitate from timidity, he was a Spaniard, but his officers dissuaded him from making an attempt to enter on account of their unfit condition.

Once across the bar, the broad bay and river-mouth offer easy navigation, and it is a beautiful voyage, though a short one, up to the site of the fine, prosperous American city which now stands at this gateway, where the Far West opens into the Far East.

As the last quarter of the eighteenth century fairly developed, an event took place which perhaps, influenced the destinies of man more than any other of modern times. Garces and Escalante had barely completed their entradas before the guns of the American Revolution had for ever shattered the fetters of a new people on the Atlantic seaboard, where a youthful giant sprang into being, a portent for Spain of great danger. The Spaniards posted their sentinels facing that way.