Page:Columbus and other heroes of American discovery; (IA columbusotherher00bell).pdf/156

 were dotted with trading houses and chapels long before its very name was heard in Europe. Unfortunately, however, neither the seekers after souls nor the hunters of peltries were men to talk much of their exploits, and though fiction has drawn largely from life in the far West in these early days for thrilling situations, little is known of the facts of the first intercourse of the white man with the various races of the great western hyperborean group of nations. Not until the powerful rival of the French in the West, the Hudson's Bay Company—of the growth of which particulars are given elsewhere—had sent forth its heroes on expeditions which were something more than trading excursions, did the first volumes appear of that extensive and fascinating literature of western travel from which the latter part of our narrative will be culled.

To atone for the reticence of the fur-trader and missionary in the far North-west, traveler after traveler succeeded Marquette and La Salle in exploring the great lakes of Canada and the shores of the Mississippi. Of these, one of the chief was Baron La Hontan, who, starting from Lake Michigan, went down the Wisconsin to the Mississippi, and is supposed to have very nearly approached the settlements of the Spanish New Mexico. In any case, he heard from some Indians, whom he called the Guaczitares—a name we altogether fail to recognize as that of any known tribe—of the existence of white men in the South; and, what was perhaps of more importance, he learned from some visitors to the Guaczitares that they came from a country beyond which lay high moutains, only to be crossed with great difficulty, but that those who had crossed them had reached a big salt lake 300 leagues round, and with a wide opening to the south. From the mountains one great river flowed into the lake, and another eastward to the Miche Sepe. The big salt lake was probably that part of the sea now known as Queen Charlotte's Sound, the river flowing into it the Columbia, and the mountain range the Rocky Mountains.

On his return journey, La Hontan descended a river supposed to have been the second alluded to by the Indians, which brought him in five weeks to the Mississippi, ascending which he came to the port of Crevecœur, then still under the command of Tonti, so that he may be said in some sense to have bridged over the gap between the two expeditions of La Salle. With his name must be associated, however, that of Father Charlevoix, the well-known historian of New France, who made what may be called the grand tour of inland America, passing up the St. Lawrence, through the lakes,