Page:Historic towns of the southern states (1900).djvu/458

 in the effort to compromise old theories with new discoveries; charts tracked by the foot of the pioneer, not by the wheel of the locomotive, graded by the paddle of the canoe, not by that of the steamer; charts that bear record to the history as well as geography of a country and chronicle its ever-clearer and ever-increasing vastness and importance. Upon such a map was the name New Orleans first written down. Naught to the north but Canada and the Great Lakes; to the east, the Atlantic sea-*board with its mere fringe of English settlements fenced in by impassable mountains; to the west, mountains again, and illimitable prairies, covered over by bounding buffalo. South, lay the Gulf of Mexico with Florida on the one side, Mexico on the other. From one of the Great Lakes at the north, Lake Michigan, to the Gulf of Mexico at the south, comes through the blank expanse of paper, the huge, black serpent line of the Mississippi twisting and curving through, a triumph of the artist, its great valley, pictured from mountain range to mountain range, teeming with Indian villages, fields of waving corn, droves of innumerable deer, and illimitable forests. At the head of navigation lay the little village of