ranges, and the valleys lying between them. To the explorer or pioneer attempting to reach the interior, they opposed a continuous mountain-wall from 3,500 to 7,000 feet in height, a slight obstacle, indeed, as compared with the mountains on the other side of the continent, but still considerable, and playing no unimportant part in history. The Atlantic Plain, as the slope east of these mountains is called, is coursed by many rivers that furnish excellent harbors at their mouths and render the whole region readily accessible from the sea. Five of these rivers, the Hudson, the Delaware, the Susquehanna, the Potomac, and the James, cut deeply into the' mountains. The valleys of these rivers to-day are roadways for great lines of travel and transportation leading to the West; but when the country was in a state of nature, only one of them offered an easy passage from the Atlantic Plain to the Mississippi Valley. Geologists tell us that once Lake Ontario had an outlet to New York Bay; and certain it is that by the Hudson and Mohawk, the streams flowing to the Lakes whose sources are intertwined with those of the Mohawk, and the short and easy portages between them, the explorer and the colonist could readily have reached the interior but for a formidable obstacle that will receive attention in another place. Despite this obstacle, the site of Oswego was visited by Englishmen before the site of Pittsburg; while it was through the Mohawk Valley that the first canal and railroad were built connecting the East and the West. From New York Bay to the St. Lawrence extends a deep valley that cuts the mountains asunder; Hudson River fills the southern half, Lake Champlain and the River Richelieu the northern half, of this valley; and these waters, together with the easy "divide" between them, have played a very important part in American history from the very first.

These geographical features of our continent have been boldly sketched, because they have had the greatest influence upon the course of American, and particularly of WesternAmerican, history. Had some convulsion of nature lowered

the Appalachian Mountains to the level of the country east and west at the time the first English colonies were founded on the Atlantic slope, or thrown up a system of mountains as high as the Appalachians along the low water-sheds that separate the Lake Basin and the Arctic Plain from the Mississippi Valley when the first French settlements in Canada were planted, no one can tell in what different lines history would have run. Nor can one rightly estimate the prodigious influence upon the Northwest of the fact that it lies partly within the Lake Basin and partly within the Mississippi Valley, and that it holds in its bosom all the rivers flowing to the Lakes on the south, and to the Mississippi on the west, from the Ohio to the head of Lake Superior.

Speaking relatively, North America has an open and a closed side; and fortunately it is the open side that faces Europe.

NOTE. The author has treated the subject of the early chapters of this work more fully in his book entitled How to Study and Teach History, N. Y., 1894, chaps. xv., xvi., xvii.

II.

THE FIRST DIVISION OF NORTH AMERICA.

FOR two hundred years after its discovery, North America had no independent life and history. The seeds of future American questions were being thickly planted, but for the time no such questions appeared. The continent was the theatre of European ambition, strife, and endeavor. Three great nations played each an important part in the dramaSpain, France, and England. We are now to see how the country was first divided among them.

I. THE SPANIARDS IN THE GULF OF MEXICO.

The Spaniards had not firmly established themselves in the West Indies before they plunged into the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Columbus himself was on the coast of South America in 1498, and on the coast of Central America in 1502 and 1503. Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Darien, and discovered and named the South Sea, in 1513. Cortez began the conquest of Mexico in 1519, and Pizarro that of Peru in 1526. In 1513 Ponce de Leon discovered and named Florida. Miruelo ran along the western side of the peninsula as far as Pensacola in 1516. In 1519 Pineda coasted the northern shore of the Gulf as far as Pánuco, in Mexico, and on his return discovered the Mississippi River, which was first called "The River of the Holy Spirit." In 1520 Ayllon sailed to the coast of Georgia and South Carolina; and five years later he continued his explorations as far as Virginia, where he planted an ill-fated settlement on the future site of Jamestown. In 1527 De Narvaez conducted an unfortunate expe

dition to the northern shore of the Gulf. He lost his life while crossing the stream of the Mississippi out at sea, but De Vaca, one of his lieutenants, and a few others, survived the perils of the deep and of the land, to tell in after-years one of the most romantic tales to be found in the history of American exploration. Hernando de Soto, Governor of Cuba, having obtained from Charles V. a grant of the country from Florida to the River of Palms, landed at Tampa Bay in 1539 with a large and well-appointed command. He hoped to find a rich Indian kingdom, such as Pizarro had found in Peru and Cortez in Mexico. After two years' marching in the interior, De Soto, disappointed in his search, found himself in latitude 35° north, on the eastern bank of the Mississippi. Crossing the river, he continued his march many hundreds of miles to the northwest; but, still disappointed, he returned the next year to the river, his command greatly reduced by battle, disease, and famine, and himself wasted in body and broken in spirit, where he died. In the sonorous language of Bancroft: "His soldiers pronounced his eulogy by grieving for their loss; the priests chanted over his body the first requiems that were ever heard on the waters of the Mississippi. To conceal his death, his body was wrapped in a mantle, and in the stillness of midnight was silently sunk in the middle of the stream. The wanderer had crossed a large part of the continent in his search for gold, and found nothing so remarkable as his burial-place." His surviving companions fled down the river to the Gulf, and made their way to their countrymen in Mexico. At the same time that De Soto was seeking his imaginary El Dorado in the region south of the Missouri, Coronado, who had come overland from Mexico, was searching in the same region for the fabled "Seven cities of Cibola." The two commands were so near each other "that an Indian runner, in a few days, might have carried tidings between them;" in fact, "Coronado actually heard of his

1

1 History: 6-volume edition, 1876, I., 50.

countryman, and sent him a letter, but his messenger failed to find De Soto's party."1 Spaniards had now virtually met in the centre of the Mississippi Valley, coming from points as distant as Tampa Bay and the Gulf of California; they had found no El Dorado or Cibola, and they gave over the attempt at exploration and conquest in these regions.

In no important sense did the Spanish discoveries make known the Mississippi to the world. Holding the shore line from Florida to Mexico, Spain, in the sixteenth century, had the finest opportunity ever offered any nation to explore, occupy, and possess the Mississippi Valley; the Appalachicola, the Mobile, the Colorado, and, above all, the Mississippi itself, invited her to ascend them and people their banks. No powerful Indian nation was on the soil to oppose her, no European rival was present to deny her right. Why did she not do so? The answer is one of the exploded theories of political economy. In that age Europeans generally, and Spaniards particularly, held to the "Bullion Theory:" The precious metals are the only form of wealth. Not finding them in the region visited by De Soto, Spain fixed her attention on regions where she had already found them; and so intent was she on the mines of Mexico and South America, that her gallions ploughed the waters of the Gulf for one hundred years, ignorant or regardless of the fact that they were crossing and recrossing before a portal that stood always open to admit them to the richest valley in the world. So indifferent was Spain to her opportunity that in the next century she allowed the Mississippi to slip from her hands to those of France, without serious protest. When another century had gone, she awoke from her indifference, and made strenuous efforts to recall the mistake. Unfortunately for her, but fortunately for the world, it was too late. Fortunately for the world for what greater calamity could have befallen civilization on this continent than a South America or a Mexico

1 Narrative and Critical History of America, II., 292.