The Great West
In days before the railway had made possible a bulky commerce by overland routes, rivers furnished the chief means of access to inland regions.The fame of the Ganges, the Euphrates, the Nile, and the Danube shows the part which great rivers have played in history.Of North America's four greatest river systems, the two in the far north have become known in times so recent that their place in history is not yet determined.One of them, the Mackenzie, a mighty stream some two thousand miles long, flows into the Arctic Ocean through what remains chiefly a wilderness.
The waters of the other, the Saskatchewan, discharge into Hudson Bay more than a thousand miles from their source, flowing through rich prairie land which is still but scantily peopled.On the Saskatchewan, as on the remaining two systems, the St.Lawrence and the Mississippi, the French were the pioneers.Though today the regions drained by these four rivers are dominated by the rival race, the story which we now follow is one of romantic enterprise in which the honors are with France.
More perhaps by accident than by design had the French been the first to settle on the St.Lawrence.Fishing vessels had hovered round the entrance to the Gulf of St.Lawrence for years before, in 1535, the French sailor, Jacques Cartier, advanced up the river as far as the foot of the torrential rapids where now stands the city of Montreal.Cartier was seeking a route to the Far East.He half believed that this impressive waterway drained the plains of China and that around the next bend he might find the busy life of an oriental city.The time came when it was known that a great sea lay between America and Asia and the mystery of the pathway to this sea long fascinated the pioneers of the St.Lawrence.Canada was a colony, a trading-post, a mission, the favorite field of Jesuit activity, but it was also the land which offered by way of the St.Lawrence a route leading illimitably westward to the Far East.
One other route rivaled the St.Lawrence in promise, and that was the Mississippi.The two rivers are essentially different in their approaches and in type.The mouth of the St.Lawrence opens directly towards Europe and of all American rivers lies nearest to the seafaring peoples of Europe.Since it flows chiefly in a rocky bed, its course changes little; its waters are clear, and they become icy cold as they approach the sea and mingle with the tide which flows into the great Gulf of St.Lawrence from the Arctic regions.The Mississippi, on the other hand, is a turbid, warm stream, flowing through soft lands.Its shifting channel is divided at its mouth by deltas created from the vast quantity of soil which the river carries in its current.On the low-lying, forest-clad, northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico it was not easy to find the mouth of the Mississippi by approaching it from the sea.The voyage there from France was long and difficult; and, moreover, Spain claimed the lands bordering on the Gulf of Mexico and declared herself ready to drive out all intruders.
Nature, it is clear, dictated that, if France was to build up her power in the interior of the New World, it was the valley of the St.Lawrence which she should first occupy.Time has shown the riches of the lands drained by the St.Lawrence.On no other river system in the world is there now such a multitude of great cities.The modern traveler who advances by this route to the sources of the river beyond the Great Lakes surveys wonders ever more impressive.Before his view appear in succession Quebec, Montreal, Toronto, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Duluth, and many other cities and towns, with millions in population and an aggregate of wealth so vast as to stagger the imagination.
Step by step had the French advanced from Quebec to the interior.
Champlain was on Lake Huron in 1615, and there the Jesuits soon had a flourishing mission to the Huron Indians.They had only to follow the shore of Lake Huron to come to the St.Mary's River bearing towards the sea the chilly waters of Lake Superior.On this river, a much frequented fishing ground of the natives, they founded the mission of Sainte Marie du Saut.Farther to the south, on the narrow opening connecting Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, grew up the post known as Michilimackinac.It was then inevitable that explorers and missionaries should press on into both Lake Superior and Lake Michigan.By the time that Frontenac came first to Canada in 1672 the French had a post called St.
Esprit on the south shore of Lake Superior near its western end and they had also passed westward from Lake Michigan and founded posts on both the Illinois and the Wisconsin Rivers which flow into the Mississippi.
