Long is the roll and great were the hardships. To the same
region, with the same object of discovering and improving, came
that typical cadet De Gascogne, the Chevalier Antoine de la
Mothe Cadillac, who, on the 21st of July, 1701, unfurled the
French flag at a certain spot where he began the building of a
town, now the town of Detroit. He became afterwards governor of
Louisiana. Then such men came as Du Tissnet, as the brothers Le
Moine de Iberville and Le Moine de Bienville, this last the
founder of New Orleans; as Father de Charlevoix, who gave the
best account we have of the country, and spoke most wisely about
its future; as La Clede, worthier than anyone to be remembered
at this day and this place, as he was the founder of your town.

The exploration of the coasts had been comparatively easy, and
thousands had attempted it. Settlers from France were the first
to try their chance inland; they traveled across a huge
continent more unknown then to the civilized world than was in
our time the Africa of Livingstone and Stanley. They did it in a
cheerful, optimistic spirit that nothing daunted but death.
Living as they did in truly "howling wildernesses," there
remained yet with them something of the mother country; and that
appeared not only in their speech and manners, but in their very
attitudes. Charlevoix meets figures of dead men fabricated by
Indians. He was glad to find that they were represented with
falling arms, from which he concluded that the authors of the
trophies had massacred some of their own kin. When Indians
killed French people, the figures represented men with their
fist on their hip, Versailles fashion.

How could it be otherwise when they lived, some of them, on a
settlement owned by a gentleman called d'Artagnan and managed,
as was appropriate, by two musketeers. One almost expects the
names of those two to have been Porthos and Aramis; but they
were d'Artiguidres and De Benac.

And these men recalled their country in more important things
than names and attitudes. Cadillac had scarcely given a name to
the spot where he meant to create a town than he sent for his
wife and younger son. It was to be a town, indeed, with wives
and children and family life, and it was so, and it has ever
been so since Cadillac willed it. When La Salle was killed in