The Great American Steamboat Race Read Online Free PDF Page B

in Quebec in 1667. He managed to acquire a land holding on the western end of the island of Montreal, a section known as Lachine. From the Iroquois natives in the area, whose language he learned, La Salle heard stories of a river called the Ohio that flowed into the great river, the Mississippi. Without the benefit of what Père Marquette and Louis Joliet were later to discover, La Salle leaped to the conclusion that the Mississippi was the hoped-for route to the Pacific Ocean and China and started making plans to explore it.
    With a go-ahead from the Canadian governor and after selling Lachine to finance his expedition, La Salle in 1669 set out for the Ohio with a party of fifteen men in five canoes. He claimed to have reached the Ohio and to have followed it as far as present-day Louisville, but he didn’t make it to the Mississippi. His attention was diverted to the establishment of a fur-trading business, at which he became a success. In 1682, apparently bored with the fur business, he had another go at exploring the Mississippi. He launched an expedition of twenty-three Frenchmen and eighteen Indians from Fort Crevecoeur, near present-day Peoria, Illinois, into canoes and descended the Illinois River to the Mississippi and then paddled down the big river to present-day Memphis, where he built a fortification he named Fort Prudhomme. From Memphis he and his party continued down the river all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, stopping at a site near present-day Venice, Louisiana, on April 9, 1682, to plant a marker post and a cross that claimed for France the entire Mississippi River basin, including all the land drained by the big river and its many tributaries. Nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman vividly memorialized the momentous event :
    On that day the realm of France received ... a stupendous accession. The fertile plains of Texas; the vast basin of the Mississippi, from its frozen northern springs to the sultry borders of the Gulf ; from the woody ridges of the Alleghanies to the bare peaks of the Rocky Mountains — a region of savannas and forests, sun-cracked deserts and grassy prairies, watered by a thousand rivers, ranged by a thousand warlike tribes, passed beneath the scepter of the Sultan of Versailles; and all by virtue of a feeble human voice, inaudible a half a mile. 1
    And to that immense, diverse territory La Salle gave a name. He called it Louisiana, in honor of the king of France, Louis XIV.
From the mouth of the Mississippi La Salle returned to Canada and then to France. In 1684 he again left France, this time with four ships and three hundred hopeful emigrants to found a colony on the Gulf of Mexico. The venture suffered a series of disasters, including attacks by pirates and Indians and the woeful consequences of poor navigation that took them farther west than they apparently intended to go. One of the ships was lost to pirates in the West Indies, another sank in an inlet off Matagorda Bay, and the third ran aground at Matagorda Bay. La Salle and the other survivors erected a fortification near present-day Victoria, Texas, and La Salle then led a group on foot to seek out the Mississippi River, a futile effort that ended when the thirtysix surviving members of the expedition mutinied. Four of the mutineers murdered La Salle on March 20, 1687, near present-day Navasota, Texas. The little colony that he had planted was wiped out in 1688 when Indians slaughtered the colony’s twenty adults and carried off their five children as captives.
The intrepid explorers of the Mississippi during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries demonstrated that the big river flowed uninterrupted from high in the continent’s heartland through changing climes to the Gulf of Mexico, the mid-continent’s gateway to the seven seas. But the early explorers never traced the Mississippi northward to its source. That notable deed awaited the coming of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft.
Restless and curious, Schoolcraft disdained