the Mississippi. The Outfit. The Voyage through Green
Bay. Fox River and the Illinois. Enters the Mississippi. Scenes Sublime
and Beautiful. Adventures in an Indian Village.

Nearly three hundred and forty years ago, in April 1541, De Soto, in
his adventurous march, discovered the majestic Mississippi, not far
from the border of the State of Tennessee. No white man's eye had ever
before beheld that flood whose banks are now inhabited by busy
millions. The Indians informed him that all the region below consisted
of dismal, endless, uninhabitable swamps. De Soto, world-weary and
woe-stricken, died upon the banks of the river. In its fathomless
depths his body found burial.

These cruel adventurers, insanely impelled in search of mines of gold,
founded no settlements, and left behind them no traces of their
passage, save that by their cruelties they had excited the implacable
ire of the Indian against the white man. A hundred years of earth's
many griefs lingered slowly away, while these vast solitudes were
peopled only by wandering savage tribes whose record must forever
remain unknown.

In the year 1641, some French envoys, from Canada, seeking to open
friendly trade with the Indians for the purchase of furs, penetrated
the northwest of our country as far as the Falls of St. Mary, near the
outlet of Lake Superior. The most friendly relations existed between
these Frenchmen and the Indians, wherever the tribes were encountered.
This visit led to no settlement. The adventurous traders purchased many
furs, with which they loaded their birch canoes: established friendly
relations with these distant Indians, and greatly extended the region
from which furs were brought to their trading posts in Canada.

Eighteen more years passed away, over the silent and gloomy wilderness,
when in 1659, a little band of these bold and hardy explorers, in their
frail canoes, with Indian guides, paddled along the lonely,
forest-fringed shores of Lake Ontario, ascended the Niagara River to
the Falls, carried their canoes on their shoulders around the rapids,
launched them again on Lake Erie, traversed that inland sea over two
hundred and fifty miles, entered the magnificent Strait, passed through
it to Lake St. Clair, crossed that lake, ascended the St. Clair River
to Lake Huron, and traversing its whole length, a distance of three
hundred miles, reached the Falls of St. Mary.

Here, at the distance of more than a thousand miles from the