_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!
[Illustration: GENERAL PEPPERELL AT LOUISBURG
_General Pepperell was commander of the English forces which on June 16, 1745, captured the town of Louisburg._]
Where were the English all this time? Did their Indian friends tell them nothing about great rivers full of crocodiles, and crook-backed, woolly oxen, and mountains of gold? After 1664 they held the whole coast from the St. Croix River to the Savannah River; but it took them a long time simply to reach the edge of the Mississippi Valley. Two adventurous men, Thomas Batts, and the German, John Lederer, wormed their way through the confused mountains of western Virginia, and Batts reached the New River about 1671,--“a pleasing but dreadful sight to see, mountains and hills piled one upon another.” They took possession of “all the territories thereunto belonging” for his Majesty Charles II. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania all had charters reaching west of the mountains; but they knew better than to try to pick up territory from under the lodge poles of the ferocious Iroquois. The English seemed to lack the discoverer’s spirit, which can be satisfied only, as the colored preacher puts it, “by unscrewing the inscrutable.” John Endicott thought he was as heroic as Marco Polo, when he went up the Merrimac River to Lake Winnepesaukee, and there cut his initials on a rock; and Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia felt very proud of himself when in 1716 he conducted a party of gentlemen on horseback across the mountains into the valley of the Shenandoah, which was still a long way from the Mississippi Basin.