da 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 five preceding generations?
Apparently it was because at this late day they thought they had
discovered a way to make it useful; for it had come to be believed that
the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California, and therefore
afforded a short cut from Canada to China. Previously the supposition
had been that it emptied into the Atlantic, or Sea of Virginia.

Chapter 2 The River and Its Explorers

LA SALLE himself sued for certain high privileges, and they were
graciously accorded him by Louis XIV of inflated memory. Chief among
them was the privilege to explore, far and wide, and build forts, and
stake out continents, and hand the same over to the king, and pay the
expenses himself; receiving, in return, some little advantages of one
sort or another; among them the monopoly of buffalo hides. He spent
several years and about all of his money, in making perilous and painful
trips between Montreal and a fort which he had built on the Illinois,
before he at last succeeded in getting his expedition in such a shape
that he could strike for the Mississippi.

And meantime other parties had had better fortune. In 1673 Joliet the
merchant, and Marque