Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 6).djvu/19

Rh undisputed possession of the Upper Missouri for at least a century. This was in view of the difficulties of navigation, which he well described—the changes and rapidity of the current, the falling in of the banks, the snags, and the shifting nature of the river bed. Brackenridge lived to see steam navigation and transportation transform the entire Missouri Valley into a thriving centre of civilization; on the sites which his eye had selected for towns, to be established in a far-distant future, there soon arose large cities. His opinion that the interests of the West would serve to break down sectionalism and conserve the Union, was amply justified by the course of events.

The expedition organized by John Jacob Astor for the purpose of founding an American fur-trading post at the mouth of the Columbia, although unhappy in its outcome, was most fortunate in its historians. The Astoria of Washington Irving is an American classic. The journals upon which he based his delightful tale are less well known, but deserving of wide acquaintance. Among the "scribbling clerks" whose fondness for keeping journals excited the ire of the "Tonquin's" choleric captain, was a young Canadian, whose narrative is, in charm of style, second only to that of Irving's; it has the added advantage of being the account of one who participated in the adventures which he describes.

Gabriel Franchère was of an honorable Canadian family. His grandfather Jacques, early in the eighteenth century, had come to New France as a ship surgeon. Jacques's son, the elder Gabriel, established himself in business at Montreal, where our author was born November 3, 1786. As a young man, Gabriel fils became a merchant's apprentice, but was easily persuaded to abandon the desk and the