ing nuns, died the first abbess of the Clarisses and the founder of 4,000 religious houses.'

The lake named, the Griffin went on her way. From Green Bay, La Salle sent her on the return voyage loaded with furs. She was never heard of again, to La Salle's most bitter disappointment. What was her fate will always be a matter of conjecture.

Who were the first white men to penetrate the territory of Illinois, probably can never be told with certainty. It is clear that the Illinois River had been visited by white men before Joliet and Marquette ascended it on their way northward in 1673. At least, there is a map in existence of earlier date on which the upper parts of the river are laid down.* Perhaps the readiest answer to the question that this map suggests is, that La Salle actually discovered the Illinois in 1672. Marquette returned to the Indian town of Kaskaskia after his first visit, to establish the mission of the Immaculate Conception, but his stay was of short duration. La Salle's eye was on the Illinois when he ascended the Lakes in 1679. Part of the Griffin's carg was rigging and anchors for a vessel to be built on that river, with which he expected to sail down the Mississippi and make the West Indies. When he parted with his vessel at Green Bay, he ascended Lake Michigan, and built Fort Miamis at the mouth, or near the mouth, of the St. Joseph River. Ascending this river to the Kankakee portage, in December, he crossed to that stream, and launched his eight canoes, containing thirty-three men, himself, Tonty, and Hennepin included, on its current. Passing places soon to become memorable in Western annals, as "Starved Rock" and Peoria Lake, he finally stopped at a point just below the lake and began a fortification that, borrowing the name from a fortress in Brabant, which had recently fallen into the hands of the French, he called Crevecoeur. The name, meaning 1 Hubbard Memorials of a Half Century, 164-166.

2 Parkman: La Salle, 23.

Broken Heart, fitly marked the desperation of his fortunes. Hitherto he had refused to believe that the Griffin was lost, but hope now grew faint. But neither his ardent temperament nor the state of his affairs would permit him to stand still. So, dispatching Father Hennepin to the Upper Mississippi, and leaving Tonty with a few men in command of the post, he started on a long winter's journey to Canada, to procure materials for the completion of a small vessel that he had put upon the stocks at Crevecœur. On this journey he crossed the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, being probably the first white man to do so. In Canada fresh disappointments awaited him, and when he returned to Illinois in November, 1680, he found his fort plundered and deserted. In an Iroquois foray it had been taken and its garrison dispersed.

In the autumn of 1681, La Salle once more travelled the long road leading from the St. Lawrence to the head of the "Lake of the Illinois," as he called Lake Michigan. The winter following, he dragged his canoes on sledges to the Illinois River, and then launched them on its stream. On February 6, 1682, he found himself on the river that he had so long sought, and which fate seemed to have decreed that he should never reach. April 9th following, he and his little party stood just above the mouth of the Mississippi, beside a column bearing the arms of France, with an appropriate inscription, and a cross, with a leaden plate, also appropriately inscribed, buried near. Some hymns having been chanted, amid volleys of musketry and shouts of "Long live the King" La Salle took formal possession, for his royal master King Louis XIV. of France and Navarre, of the country of Louisiana, from the mouth of the Ohio along the Mississippi and the rivers which flow into it from its source beyond the country of the Sioux to its mouth at the sea, and also to the mouth of the River of Palms. Another hymn was chanted, and renewed shouts of "Live the King!" completed the transaction.

This act was far more significant than the similar one per

formed by Saint-Lusson at the Saut, eleven years before. It closed the Mississippi to the Spaniards for one hundred years; it led to a French colony in Louisiana; it made necessary that chain of wilderness posts which Braddock sought to pierce at the Forks of the Ohio in 1755. That the Mississippi Valley was laid open to the eyes of the world by a voyageur who came overland from Canada, and not by a voyageur who ploughed through the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico from Spain, is a fact of far-reaching import. The first Louisiana was the whole valley; this and the Lake-St. Lawrence Basin made up the second New France. How the two blended and supplemented each other geographically, as well as their first historical relations, have been indicated. Before we lose sight of the act that La Salle performed that April day we should mark the date that fixes its relation to the English colonies -1682, the year that Penn laid out the squares of Philadelphia, but thirty-four years before Spotswood and his retinue drank their wine on the banks of the Shenandoah.

Our present theme is the discovery of the Northwest. Other matters have been introduced only as they lead up to that grand result. But French ambition was not absorbed by the Mississippi problem. Frenchmen pushed into the great forests and plains beyond the sources of that river. In the seventeenth century, they knew the "thousand lakes" of Minnesota better than Americans knew them sixty years ago. Du Lhut, for whom the terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad is named, before the year 1700 explored much of the region through which that railroad runs. Nor have we attempted more than an outline map of the earliest history of the Old Northwest. Having done so much—having indicated how the French, long before the English reached the foot-hills of the Alleghanies, had crossed and threaded the great Western Valley, we are ready to attempt a similar map of early Northwestern colonization.

But before essaying that task, a word concerning the en

chanting tale of French discovery in North America. As we read that tale, we seem, for the time, to be looking out of the wondering eyes with which the French first surveyed this new northern and western world-the eyes of Cartier as he sailed up the St. Lawrence; of Champlain as he paddled his bark canoe up the current of the Richelieu or shouldered it around the rapids of the Ottawa; of Nicollet as he steered through the Straits of Mackinaw into the expanse of Lake Michigan; of Joliet as he rowed beneath the cliffs of the Saguenay—the eyes of Brulé at the Saut, of Hennepin at Niagara, of Marquette on the River of Conception, of Du Lhut in the country of the Dakotas-the eyes of La Salle as he descended the Ohio, followed the Indian trails of Illinois and Arkansas, or pronounced that sounding formula at the mouth of the Mississippi-we seem to look out of their eyes upon this virgin world of forest and stream, of prairie and lake, of buffalo and elk, of natural beauty and human ugliness. But, after all, our impressions are faint compared with theirs. Ideal presence is not real presence. Even if we could follow them on their old paths, we could not undo the great changes that civilized man has wrought. Nor can we recall the innocency of their eyes any more than we can renew the devotion of their hearts to King and Church. All that is possible for us is a pale picture of as grand a panorama of natural beauty and sublimity as was ever unrolled to the vision of explorers. To men like Champlain, Marquette, and La Salle, exploring New France was a poem whose splendor almost made them forget the hardships and perils of the exploration.

IV.

THE FRENCH COLONIZE THE NORTHWEST.

THE English colonies in America began with villages and outlying farms; the French colonies, with missionary stations, fortified posts, or trading houses, or with the three combined. The triple alliance of priest, soldier, and trader continued through the period of colonization. Often, but not always, settlements grew up around these missions or posts; and these settlements constituted the colonies of New France.

Immediately following the visit of Le Caron and Champlain to the "Mer Douce," in 1615, the Récollet Fathers established missions on its eastern side, which, however, soon passed into the hands of the Jesuits. These missions were stepping-stones to the regions beyond. The reader who has followed the narrative thus far will not be surprised to learn that the French beginnings in the Northwest were within the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Some of these beginnings long ago disappeared, others became permanent settlements. Saint-Esprit, at La Pointe, planted by Allouez in 1665, is one example of the first; Saut Ste. Marie, planted by Marquette in 1668, of the second. This village is the oldest town in the Northwest--fourteen years older than Philadelphia, and one hundred and twenty years older than Marietta, O. A mission was planted on the island of Michilimackinac within a year of that at the Saut. This establishment was soon removed to Pointe St. Ignace, on the mainland, to the north and west, and afterward to the northern point of the Southern Peninsula. But we are not able to trace a continuous