whites
during a term of years which seems incredible in our energetic days. One
may 'sense' the interval to his mind, after a fashion, by dividing it
up in this way: After De Soto glimpsed the river, a fraction short of
a quarter of a century elapsed, and then Shakespeare was born; lived a
trifle more than half a century, then died; and when he had been in his
grave considerably more than half a century, the SECOND white man saw
the Mississippi. In our day we don't allow a hundred and thirty years to
elapse between glimpses of a marvel. If somebody should discover a creek
in the county next to the one that the North Pole is in, Europe and
America would start fifteen costly expeditions thither: one to explore
the creek, and the other fourteen to hunt for each other.

For more than a hundred and fifty years there had been white settlements
on our Atlantic coasts. These people were in intimate communication
with the Indians: in the south the Spaniards were robbing, slaughtering,
enslaving and converting them; higher up, the English were trading beads
and blankets to them for a consideration, and throwing in civilization
and whiskey, 'for lagniappe;' and in Canada the French were schooling
them in a rudimentary way, missionarying among them, and drawing whole
populations of them at a time to Quebec, and later to Montreal, to buy
furs of them. Necessarily, then, these various clusters of whites must
have heard of the great river of the far west; and indeed, they did
hear of it vaguely,--so vaguely and indefinitely, that its course,
proportions, and locality were hardly even guessable. The mere
mysteriousness of the matter ought to have fired curiosity and compelled
exploration; but this did not occur. Apparently nobody happened to want
such a river, nobody needed it, nobody was curious about it; so, for
a century and a half the Mississippi remained out of the market and
undisturbed. When De Soto found it, he was not hunting for a river, and
had no present occasion for one; consequently he did not value it or
even take any particular notice of it.

But at last La Salle the Frenchman conceived the idea of seeking out
that river and exploring it. It always happens that when a man seizes
upon a neglected and important idea, people inflamed with the same
notion crop up all around. It happened so in this instance.

Naturally the question suggests itself, Why did these people want the
river now when nobody had wanted it in the fi