the white
flag of France.

Other villages began on the eastern bank of the river--Cahokia, opposite
the present city of St. Louis, and Prairie du Rocher, nearer Kaskaskia.
Ste. Genevieve also was built in what is now the state of Missouri, on
land which then was claimed by the Spaniards. There was a Post of
Natchitoches on the Red River, as well as a Post of Washita on the
Washita River. Settlements were also founded upon La Fourche and Fausse
Riviere above New Orleans.

"The finest country we have seen," wrote one of the adventurers in those
days, "is all from Chicago to the Tamaroas. It is nothing but prairie
and clumps of wood as far as you can see. The Tamaroas are eight leagues
from the Illinois." Chicago was a landing place and portage from the
great lakes long before a stockade with a blockhouse was built called
Fort Dearborn.

"Monjolly," wrote the same adventurer, "or Mount Jolliet, is a mound of
earth on the prairie on the right side of the Illinois River as you go
down, elevated about thirty feet. The Indians say at the time of the
great deluge one of their ancestors escaped, and this little mountain is
his canoe which he turned over there."

La Salle had learned from the Iroquois about the Ohio River. But the
region through which it flowed to the Mississippi remained for a long
while an unbroken wilderness. The English settlements on their strip of
Atlantic coast, however, and the French settlements in the west, reached
gradually out over this territory and met and grappled. Whichever power
got and kept the mastery of the west would get the mastery of the
continent.

The territory of Kentucky, like that of Michigan, was owned by no tribe
of Indians. "It was the common hunting and fighting ground of Ohio
tribes on the north and Cherokees and Chickasaws on the south."

There was indeed one exception to the uninhabited state of all that land
stretching betwixt the Alleghanies and the Mississippi. Vincennes, now
a town of Indiana, was, after Kaskaskia, the oldest place in the west.
This isolated post is said to have been founded by French soldiers and
emigrants. Five thousand acres were devoted to the common field. De
Vincennes, for whom it was named, was a nephew of Louis Jolliet. And
while it is not at all certain that he founded the post, he doubtless
sojourned there in the Indiana country during his roving life. A small
stockade on the site of the town of Fort Wayne is said to have been
built by him.