Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/67



by the Indians as beautiful meadows covered with grass, and abounding in wild game. In the Indian language “Mis-sis” signifies meadow, and the word “sepe” a river; hence we have “Mississippi,” as some early French explorers wrote it, signifying “River of the Meadows.”

The French at first supposed that the “River of the Meadows” flowed toward the Pacific Ocean and would afford the long sought direct route to china and India. The people of western Europe had for nearly a hundred and fifty years been hoping to find a direct route by water across the new continent, and it was long believed that it would be reached through this “Great River,” often mentioned by explorers.

The Jesuit revelations given by Father Claude Dablon in 1607, in an account of the Illinois Indian, says:

“These people were the first to come to Green Bay to trade with the French. The are settled in the midst of a beautiful country away southwest toward a great river named Mis-sis-se-pi. It takes its rise far in the north, flowing toward the south, discharging its waters into the sea. All of the vast country through which it flows is of prairie without trees. It is beyond this river that the Illinois live, and from which are detached the 'Mus-co-tins,' which signifies a land of trees.”

It does not appear to have been suspected by any of the early French Explorers that this river, so often told of by the Indians, was part of the “Great River” discovered by De Soto more than one hundred and thirty years before.