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TOWARD sunset on the most lovely and glorious evening, we came out of the narrow little winding Five River, and entered the grand Mississippi, which flowed broad and clear as a mirror between hills which extended into the distance, and now looked blue beneath the mild, clear blue heavens, in which the new moon and the evening star ascended, becoming brighter as the sun sank lower behind the hills. The pure misty veil of the Indian summer was thrown over the landscape; one might have believed that it was the earth's smoke of sacrifice which arose in the evening toward the gentle heavens. Not a breath of air moved, every thing was silent and still in that grand spectacle; it was indescribably beautiful. Just then a shot was fired; a smoke issued from one of the small green islands, and flocks of ducks and wild geese flew up round about, escaping from the concealed sportsman, who I hope this evening returned without game. All was again silent and still, and the Menomonie advanced with a quiet, steady course up the glorious river.

I stood on the upper deck with the captain, Mr. Smith, and the representative from Minnesota, Mr. Sibley, who, with his wife, and child, were returning home from Washington.

Was this, then, indeed, the Mississippi, that wild giant   [p. 4]   of nature, which I had imagined would be so powerful, so divine, so terrible? Here its waters were clear, of a fresh, light-green color, and within their beautiful frame of distant violet-blue mountains, they lay like a heavenly mirror, bearing on their bosom verdant, vine-covered islands, like islands of the blessed. The Mississippi was here in its youth, in its state of innocence as yet. It has not as yet advanced very far from its fountains; no crowd of steamboats muddy its waters. The Menomonie and one other, a still smaller boat, are the only ones which ascend the river above Galena; no cities cast into it their pollution; pure rivers only flow into its waters, and aborigines and primeval forests still surround it. Afterward, far below and toward the world's sea, where the Mississippi comes into the life of the states, and becomes a statesman, he has his twelve hundred steamers, and I know not how many thousand sailing-boats, gives himself up to cities and the population of cities, and is married to the Missouri: then it is quite different; then is it all over with the beauty and innocence of the Mississippi.

But now, now it was beautiful, and the whole of that evening on the Mississippi was to me like an enchantment.

The Mississippi, discovered by Europeans, has two epochs, and in each a romance: the one as different to the other as day and night, as the sun-bright idyl to the gloomy tragedy, as the Mississippi here in its youth, and the Mississippi down at St. Louis, as Mississippi-Missouri. The first belongs to the northern district, the second to the southern; the former has its hero, the mild pastor, Father Marquette; the latter the Spanish soldier, Ferdinand de Soto.

France and England, equally jealous competitors for territorial acquisitions, were the first possessors of the land of North America. The French Jesuits were the first who penetrated into the wildernesses of Canada and   [p. 5]   to the great lakes of the West. Religious enthusiasm planted the Puritan colony on Plymouth Rock; religious enthusiasm planted the cross, together with the lilies of France, on the shores of the St. Lawrence, beside Niagara, and as far as St. Marie, among the wild Indians by Lake Superior. The noble, chivalric Champlain, full of ardor and zeal, said, "The salvation of a soul is worth more than the conquest of a kingdom."

That was at the time when the disciples of Loyola went forth over the world to conquer it as a kingdom for the Prince of Peace, and inscribed the sign of the cross in Japan, in China, in India, in Ethiopia, among the Caffirs, in California, in Paraguay. They invited the barbarian to the civilization of Christianity. The priests who penetrated from Canada to the deserts of Western America were among the noblest of their class.

"They had the faults of ascetic superstition; but the horrors of a Canadian life in the wilderness were resisted by an invincible, passive courage, and a deep internal tranquillity. Away from the amenities of life, away from the opportunities of vain-glory, they became dead to the world, and possessed their souls in unutterable peace. The few who lived to grow old, though bowed by the toils of a long mission, still kindled with the fervor of apostolic zeal. The history of their labors is connected with the origin of every celebrated town in the annals of French America: not a cape was turned, not a river entered, but a Jesuit led the way."

The Jesuits, Bribeuf and Daniel, and the gentle Lallemand, accompanied a party of barefooted Hurons to their country through dangerous forests. They won the regard and the love of the savages.

Bribeuf, who is said to have been the pattern of every religious virtue, lived fifteen years among the Hurons, baptizing them to the religion of Christ, and instructing them in the occupations of peace. Works of love, self-   [p. 6]   mortification, prayers deep into the night--such was his life. Yet all the more increased his love for the Master whom he served, and his desire to suffer in His service. He thirsted after it as others thirst after the delights of life. He made a vow never to decline the opportunity of martyrdom, and never to receive the death-blow except with joy.

Such was a faith to remove mountains; and it did more, it implanted the vitalizing love of Christ in the bloodthirsty heart of the savage. The great warrior Ahasistari said, "Before you came to this country, where I have incurred the greatest perils, and have alone escaped, have I said to myself, 'Some powerful spirit has the guardianship of my days!'" And he professed his belief in Jesus as the good Genius and Protector, whom he had before unconsciously adored. After trials of his sincerity he was baptized; and enlisting a troop of converts, savages like himself, "Let us strive," he exclaimed, "to make the whole world embrace the faith in Jesus." ^[1*]

Further and further still advanced the missionaries toward the West; they heard of powerful and warlike Indian races, such as the mighty Sioux, who dwelt by the great River Mississippi, of the Erie, and Chippewas, and Potawatomies, and others who dwelt by the great lakes. Dangers, fatigues, wildernesses, savages, all stood in threatening array before them, but only the more to allure them.

Hostile tribes overcame the Indians who conducted them. The savage Mohawks took the missionary Isaac Jogues prisoner, and with him the noble chief Ahasistari. Ahasistari had succeeded in finding a hiding-place; but when he saw Jogues a captive, he stepped forth to him, saying, "My brother, I made a vow to thee that I would share thy fate, whether life or death --How am I to keep my vow?"

The savages exercised their cruelty upon them for several   [p. 7]   days and nights. When Jogues ran the gauntlet, he consoled himself with a vision of the glory of the Queen of Heaven. One evening, after a day of torture, an ear of Indian corn was thrown to the good father, and see! upon the broad leaf there were drops of water, or of dew, sufficient to baptize two captive Christian converts!

Ahasistari and two of his people were burned. He met death with the pride of an Indian and the calmness of a Christian.

Father Jogues had expected the same fate; but his life was spared and his liberty granted to him. Roaming through the magnificent forests of the Mohawk Valley, he wrote the name of Jesus on the bark of trees, graved the cross, and took possession of these countries in the name of God. Often lifting up his voice in thanksgiving, consoling himself in his sorrow with the thought that he alone, in that vast region, adored the true God, the God of heaven and of earth.

He returned safely to his own people in Canada, but merely, two years afterward, to set out once more to seek new perils in the same service. "I shall go, but shall never return," said he, on setting out; and soon afterward was taken prisoner by the Mohawks, who said that he, by his enchantments, had blighted their harvest. Timid by nature, yet courageous through his zeal, he received his death-blow with calmness.

Bribeuf, Anthony, Daniel, and the mild Lallemand, all suffered martyrdom amid such torments as only Indians can devise; suffered it with that pious courage which only the love of Christ can inspire.

The villages and settlements founded by the good fathers were burned, and the Christian converts perished by fire and sword. All the many years' labor of the Jesuits was destroyed, and the wilderness seemed once more to grow over their traces.

Such great adversities might be supposed sufficient to   [p. 8]   quench the ardor of the missionaries. Not at all! They pressed forward anew.

While the savage nations were carrying on cruel wars one with another, and converting all the paths through the forest of the West into paths of death, the Bishop of Quebec, Francis de Laval, was animated by the desire of conveying the doctrines of peace to the shores of the Great River. He desired to go himself; but the lot fell on René Mesnard. Every personal consideration seemed to retain him at Quebec, but powerful instincts urged him to risk his life in the enterprise. He was already old when he entered on the path still red with the blood of his predecessors. "In three or four months," wrote he to a friend, on his journey, "and you may add my name to those of the dead."

He went, never again to return. Afar off in the wilderness of the West, while his attendant was one day occupied in the transport of a boat, he entered a forest and was never more seen: his cassock and breviary were long retained as amulets among the Sioux! Another missionary was killed by the arrows of the Indians during a fight between two hostile tribes.

It is a refreshment to turn from these bloody and cruel scenes, which marked the first introduction of Christianity by Europe into the West, to the idyllian and peaceful episode of the Jesuit missionary, Marquette, and his labors amid those savage, warlike Indian tribes. It is like a sunbeam between thunder-clouds.

Already had the indefatigable Father Aloüez visited most of the Indian tribes around Lake Superior, and during two residences among them had taught the Chippewas to chant the Paternoster and Ave Maria, had been invited by the Potawatomies, the worshipers of the sun, to their huts; had smoked the pipe of peace with the Illinois tribes, who told him of their great fields overgrown with tall grass, where troops of wild deer and buffaloes grazed;   [p. 9]   he had even met the quarrelsome and mighty Sioux, who lived on wild rice, covered their huts with skins of animals instead of bark, and dwelt upon the prairie near the Great River, which they called Messipi.

Marquette determined to discover and sail down the Great River.

He had gathered around him the remains of the Huron nation, and settled down with them on the shores of Lake Michigan, where there was abundance of fish. There they built themselves huts.

It was from this place that Marquette, accompanied by a Frenchman named Joliet, and a young Indian of the Illinois tribe as guide, set forth on his journey of discovery. The French intendant of Canada, Talon, favored Marquette's enterprise, wishing to ascertain whether the banner of France could be carried down the Great River as far as the Pacific Ocean, or planted side by side with that of Spain on the Gulf of Mexico.

Marquette sought by his journey the honor of a higher master than an earthly sovereign: "I shall gladly lay down my life for the salvation of souls," said he, in answer to a messenger of the Potawatomies, who warned him "that these distant nations never spared strangers; that their mutual wars filled the shores with warriors; and that the Great River abounded with monsters which devoured both men and canoes and that the excessive heat was mortal." And on hearing his reply, the children of the wilderness united with him in prayer for his preservation.

"At the last village on Fox River ever visited by the French," using the words of Bancroft the historian, for I can not have a better guide, "where Kickapoos, Mascoutins, and Miamis dwelt together on a beautiful hill, in the centre of the prairies and magnificent groves that extended as far as the eye could reach, and where Aloüez had already raised the cross, which the savages ornamented with   [p. 10]   brilliant skins and crimson belts, a thanksgiving offering to the great Manitou, the ancients assembled in council to receive the pilgrims.

"'My companion,' said Marquette, 'is an envoy of France to discover new countries, and I am embassador from God to enlighten them with the Gospel;' and offering presents, he begged two guides for the morrow. The wild men answered courteously, and gave in return a mat, to serve as a couch during the long voyage.

"Behold then, in 1673, on the 10th of June, the meek, single-hearted, unpretending, illustrious Marquette, with Joliet for his associate, five Frenchmen as his companions, and two Algonquins as guides, lifting their canoes on their backs, and walking across the narrow portage that divides the Fox River from the Wisconsin. They reach the water-shed; uttering a special prayer to the immaculate Virgin, they leave the streams that, flowing onward, could have borne their greetings to the castle of Quebec; already they stand by the Wisconsin. 'The guides returned,' says the gentle Marquette, 'leaving us alone, in this unknown land, in the hands of Providence.'

"France and Christianity stood in the valley of the Mississippi.

"Embarking on the broad Wisconsin, the discoverers as they sailed west went solitarily down the stream between alternate prairies and hill-sides, beholding neither man nor the wonted beasts of the forests. No sound broke the appalling silence, but the ripple of their canoe and the lowing of the buffalo. In seven days 'they entered happily the Great River with a joy that could not be expressed;' and the two birch-bark canoes, raising their happy sails under new skies and to unknown breezes, floated down the calm magnificence of the ocean stream over the broad, clear sand-bars, the resort of innumerable water-fowl; gliding past islets that swelled from the bosom of the stream, with their tufts of massive thickets, and   [p. 11]   between the wide plains of Illinois and Iowa, all garlanded with majestic forests, or checkered by island groves and the open vastness of the prairie.

"About sixty leagues below the mouth of the Wisconsin, the western bank of the Mississippi bore on its sands the trail of men; a little foot-path was discerned leading into a beautiful prairie, and, leaving the canoes, Joliet and Marquette resolved alone to brave a meeting with the savages. After walking six miles they beheld a village on the banks of a river, and two others on a slope at a distance of a mile and a half from the first. The river was the Meu-in-gou-e-na, or Moingona, of which we have corrupted the name into Des Moines. Marquette and Joliet were the first white men who trod the soil of Iowa. Commending themselves to God, they uttered a loud cry. The Indians hear; four old men advance slowly to meet them, bearing the peace-pipe, brilliant with many-colored plumes.

"'We are Illinois,' said they; that is, when translated, 'we are men;' and they offered the calumet. An aged chief received them at his cabin with upraised hands, exclaiming, 'How beautiful is the sun, Frenchman, when thou comest to visit us! Our whole village awaits thee; thou shalt enter in peace into all our dwellings.'

"At the great council, Marquette published to them the one true God, their Creator. He spoke also of the great captain of the French, the governor of Canada, who had chastised the Five Nations and commanded peace; and he questioned them respecting the Mississippi, and the tribes that possessed its banks. For the messengers who announced the subjection of the Iroquois, a magnificent festival was prepared of hominy and fish, and the choicest viands from the prairies.

"After six days' festivities among these wild people, the little band proceeded onward. 'I did not fear death,' said Marquette; 'I should have esteemed it the greatest happiness to have died for the glory of God.'

  [p. 12]  

"They passed the perpendicular rocks, which wore the appearance of monsters; they heard at a distance the noise of the waters of the Missouri, known to them by its Algonquin name of Pekitanoni; and when they came to the most beautiful confluence of rivers in the world, where the swifter Missouri rushes like a conqueror into the calmer Mississippi, dragging it, as it were, hastily to the sea, the good Marquette resolved in his heart one day to ascend the mighty river to its source; to cross the ridge that divides the oceans, and, descending a westerly flowing stream, to publish the Gospel to all the people of this New World.

"In a little less than forty leagues the canoes floated past the Ohio, which was then and long afterward called the Wabash. Its banks were tenanted by numerous villages of the peaceful Shawnees, who quailed under the incursions of the Iroquois.

"The thick canes began to appear so close and strong that the buffalo could not break through them, and the insects became intolerable. The prairies vanished, and forests of white wood, admirable for their vastness and height, crowded even to the skirts of the pebbly shore. It was also observed that, in the land of the Chickasaws, the Indians had guns.

'They reached the village of Mitchigamea, in a region which had not been visited by Europeans since the days of De Soto. 'Now.' thought Marquette, 'we must indeed ask the aid of the Virgin. Armed with bows and arrows, with clubs, axes, and bucklers, amid continual whoops, the natives, bent on war, embarked in vast canoes made out of the trunks of hollow trees; but at the sight of the mysterious peace-pipe held aloft, God touched the hearts of the old men, who checked the impetuosity of the young; and, throwing their bows and quivers into the canoes as a token of peace, they prepared a hospitable welcome.'   [p. 13]   "Thus had the travelers descended below the entrance of the Arkansas to the genial climes which have scarcely any winter but rains, to the vicinity of the Gulf of Mexico, and to tribes of Indians who had obtained arms by traffic with the Spaniards or with Virginia.

"So, having spoken of God, and the mysteries of the Catholic faith--having become certain that the Father of Rivers went not to the ocean, east of Florida, nor yet to the Gulf of California, Marquette and Joliet left Arkansea and ascended the Mississippi.

"At the thirty-eighth degree of latitude they entered the River Illinois, and discovered a country without its equal for the fertility of its beautiful prairies, covered with buffaloes and stags --for the loveliness of its rivulets, and the prodigal abundance of wild ducks and swans, and of a species of parrot and wild turkeys. The tribe of Indians that tenanted its banks entreated Marquette to come and reside among them. One of their chiefs, with their young men, conducted the party by way of Chicago to Lake Michigan; and before the end of September all were safe in Green Bay.

"Joliet returned to Quebec to announce the discovery, the fame of which, through Talon, quickened the ambition of Colbert. The unaspiring Marquette remained to preach the Gospel to the Miamis, who dwelt in the north of Illinois, round Chicago. Two years afterward, sailing from Chicago to Mackinaw, he entered a little river in Michigan. Erecting an altar, he said mass according to the ritual of the Catholic Church, and then desired the men who had conducted his canoe to leave him alone for half an hour.

"At the end of the time they went to seek him, but he was no more. The good missionary-discoverer of a world had fallen asleep on the margin of the stream that bears his name. Near its mouth the canoe-men dug his grave in the sand. Ever after, the forest-rangers, if in danger   [p. 14]   on Lake Michigan, would invoke his name. The people of the West will build his monument."

Thus much of Father Marquette; a short human life; but how full, how beautiful, how complete and perfect! Do you not see a ray of heavenly light shine through that misty, blood-stained valley of the Mississippi? Lower down on the Mississippi I shall tell you of Ferdinand de Soto.