stitution: it was established when I was a boy), it reminds me of the truces and the peaces of Europe. They always begin, "In the name of the most holy and undivided Trinity," and go on to declare "there shall be perfect and perpetual peace and unity between the subjects of such and such potentates for all time to come;" and in less than seven years they are at war again.

DISCOVERY OF THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARQUETTE.

GEORGE BANCROFT.

BEHOLD then, in 1673, on the tenth day of June, James Marquette and Louis Jolliet, five Frenchmen as companions, and two Algonkins as guides, dragging their two canoes across the narrow portage that divides the Fox River from the Wisconsin. They reach the watershed; uttering a special prayer to the immaculate Virgin, they part from the streams that could have borne their greetings to the castle of Quebec. "The guides returned," says the gentle Marquette, "leaving us alone, in this unknown land, in the hands of Providence." Embarking on the broad Wisconsin, the discoverers went solitarily down its current, between alternate plains and hillsides, beholding neither man nor familiar beasts; no sound broke the silence but the ripple of their canoes and the lowing of the buffalo. In seven days "they entered happily the great river, with a joy that could not be expressed," and, raising their sails under new skies and to unknown breezes, floated down the calm magnificence of the ocean stream, over clear sand-bars, the resort of innumerable water-fowl, through clusters of islets tufted with

massive thickets, and between the natural parks of Illinois and Iowa.

About sixty leagues below the Wisconsin, the western bank of the Mississippi bore on the sands the trail of men; a foot-path was discerned leading into beautiful fields; and Jolliet and Marquette resolved alone to brave a meeting with the savages. After walking six miles, they beheld a village on the banks of a river, and two others on a slope, at a distance of a mile and a half from the first. The river was the Moingona, of which we have corrupted the name into Des Moines. Marquette and Jolliet, the first white men who trod the soil of Iowa, commending themselves to God, uttered a loud cry. Four old men advanced slowly to meet them, bearing the peace-pipe, brilliant with many-colored plumes. "We are Illinois," said they, that is, when translated, "We are men;" and they offered the calumet. An aged chief received them at his cabin with upraised hands, exclaiming, "How beautiful is the sun, Frenchman, when thou comest to visit us! Our village awaits thee; enter in peace into our dwellings."

To the council, Marquette published the one true God, their Creator. He spoke of the great captain of the French, the governor of Canada, who had chastised the Five Nations and commanded peace; and he questioned them respecting the Mississippi and the tribes that possessed its banks.

After six days' delay, and invitations to new visits, the chieftain of the tribe, with hundreds of warriors, attended the strangers to their canoes; and, selecting a peace-pipe embellished with the head and neck of brilliant birds and feathered over with plumage of various hues, they hung round Marquette the sacred calumet, the mysterious arbiter of peace and war, a safeguard among the nations.

"I did not fear death," says Marquette, in July; "I

should have esteemed it the greatest happiness to have died for the glory of God." They passed the perpendicular rocks, which wore the appearance of monsters; they heard at a distance the noise of the waters of the Missouri, known to them by its Algonkin name of Pekitanoni; and when they came to the grandest confluence of rivers in the world, where the swifter Missouri rushes like a conqueror into the calmer Mississippi, dragging it, as it were, hastily to the sea, the good Marquette resolved in his heart one day to ascend the mighty river to its source; to cross the ridge that divides the ocean, and, descending a westerly-flowing stream, to publish the gospel to all the people of this New World.

In a little less than forty leagues the canoes floated past the Ohio, which then, and long afterward, was called the Wabash. Its banks were tenanted by numerous villages of the peaceful Shawnees, who quailed under the incursions. of the Iroquois.

The thick canes begin to appear so close and strong that the buffalo could not break through them; the insects become intolerable; as a shelter against the suns of July the sails are folded into an awning. The prairies vanish; and forests of white-wood, admirable for their vastness and height, crowd even to the skirts of the pebbly shore. In the land of the Chickasas fire-arms were already in use.

Near the latitude of thirty-three degrees, on the western bank of the Mississippi, stood the village of Mitchigamea, in a region that had not been visited by Europeans since the days of De Soto.

"Now," thought Marquette, "we must, indeed, ask the aid of the Virgin." Armed with bows and arrows, with clubs, axes, and bucklers, amid continual whoops, the natives embark in boats made of the trunks of huge hollow trees; but at the sight of the peace-pipe held aloft

they threw down their bows and quivers and prepared a hospitable welcome.

The next day a long, wooden boat, containing ten men, escorted the discoverers, for eight or ten leagues, to the village of Akansea, the limit of their voyage. They had left the region of the Algonkins, and, in the midst of the Dakotas and Chickasas, could speak only by an interpreter. A half league above Akansea they were met by two boats, in one of which stood the commander, holding in his hand. the peace-pipe, and singing as he drew near. After offering the pipe he gave bread of maize. The wealth of his tribe consisted in buffalo-skins. Their weapons were axes of steel,-a proof of commerce with Europeans.

Having descended below the entrance of the Arkansas, and having ascertained that the father of rivers went not to the Gulf of California, but was undoubtedly the river of the Spiritu Santo of the Spaniards which pours its flood of waters into the Gulf of Mexico, on the seventeenth of July Marquette and Jolliet left Akansca and ascended the Mississippi, having the greatest difficulty in stemming its

currents.

At the thirty-eighth degree of latitude they entered the river Illinois, which was broad and deep, and peaceful in its flow. Its banks were without a paragon for its prairies and its forests, its buffaloes and deer, its turkeys and geese and many kinds of game, and even beavers; and there were many small lakes and rivulets. "When I was told of a country without trees," wrote Jolliet, "I imagined a country that had been burned over, or of a soil too poor to produce anything; but we have remarked just the contrary, and it would be impossible to find a better soil for grain, for vines, or any fruits whatever." He held the country on the Illinois River to be the most beautiful and the most easy to colonize. "There is no need," he said, "that an

emigrant should employ ten years in cutting down the forest and burning it. On the day of his arrival the emigrant could put the plough into the earth." The tribe of the Illinois entreated Marquette to come back and reside among them. One of their chiefs with young men guided the party to the portage, which, in the spring and the early part of summer, was but half a league long, and they easily reached the lake. "The place at which we entered the lake," to use the words of Jolliet, "is a harbor very convenient to receive ships and to give them protection against the wind." Before the end of September the explorers were safe in Green Bay; but Marquette was exhausted by his labors.

At Quebec, while Jolliet's journal was waited for, the utility of the discovery was at once set forth It will open the widest field for the publication of the Christian faith; the way to the Gulf of California, and so to the seas of Japan and China, will be found by ascending the Missouri to the water-shed on the west; an admirable line of navigation may be opened between Quebec and Florida by cutting through the portage between Chicago and the Illinois River; moreover, the noblest opportunity is given for planting colonies in a country which is vast and beautiful and most fertile. In a relation sent, in 1674, by Father Dablon, it was proposed to connect Lake Michigan with the Illinois River by a canal.

In 1675, Marquette, who had been delayed by his failing health for more than a year, rejoined the Illinois on their river. Assembling the tribe, whose chiefs and men were reckoned at two thousand, he raised before them pictures of the Virgin Mary, spoke to them of one who had died on the cross for all men, and built an altar and said mass in their presence on the prairie. Again celebrating the mys tery of the eucharist, on Easter Sunday he took possession