Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 21.djvu/360



348

T. C. ELLIOTT

Orleans with a large party and wintered on the Saint Peter River, about where Captain Carver claims to have wintered in 1766-7. Each year intervening, when Indian hostilities did not prevent, Frenchmen were in this field gathering peltries. From Lake Superior also the traders to the West had been going from the Grand Portage to Lake Winnipeg and beyond for many years. Captain Carver then did not travel through any unknown country or mingle with Indians who had not met with white people.

We interpolate here a few items of contemporaneous his- tory. In 1762-3, France parted title to her possessions in America, ceding to Britain, as a result of the war just closed, all those parts lying east and southeast of the Mississippi River, and to Spain, by gift, all lying to the westward then known as Louisiana, including the city of New Orleans. Saint Louis was founded in 1764 by Pierre Laclede, a French merchant from New Orleans. Both cities were French in their people, customs and speech, and remained so in spite of the Spanish governmental control. Laclede's licenses gave him at least partial rights to the Indian trade on the Mississippi, the Saint Peter and the Missouri rivers. The western military and trading post of the British was at Mackinac, but from there the trade in the Mississippi Valley was almost entirely carried on by French licensees. In the time of Captain Carver, then, the Indians of the Upper Mississippi, in their relations with traders and priests, still heard only the French language spoken by white people. All commerce then was carried on by use of the water routes and portages, and the place of rendez- vous was at Prairie du Chien, which was about equally dis- tant between Mackinac and Saint Louis by the trade route.

The language used by Captain Carver in his Travels, in referring to the name Oregon, has been quoted too often to require repetition. He speaks of having learned "from the Indians" and by his "own observations" of the close proximity of the sources of the four principal rivers of the continent of North America among some high lands just south of the Lake