Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/281

Rh had already raised the cross, which the savages ornamented with brilliant skins and crimson belts, a thanksgiving offering to the great Manitou,—the ancients assembled in council to receive the pilgrims.

“ ‘My companion,’ said Marquette, ‘is an envoy of France to discover new countries, and I am ambassador from God to enlighten them with the Gospel;’ and offering presents, he begged two guides for the morrow. The wild men answered courteously, and gave in return a mat, to serve as a couch during the long voyage.

“Behold then, in 1673, on the tenth of June, the meek, single-hearted, unpretending, illustrious Marquette, with Joliet for his associate, five Frenchmen as his companions, and two Algonquins as guides, lifting their canoes on their backs, and walking across the narrow portage that divides the Fox river from the Wisconsin. They reach the water-shed; uttering a special prayer to the immaculate Virgin, they leave the streams that, flowing onwards, could have borne their greetings to the castle of Quebec;—already they stand by the Wisconsin. ‘The guides returned,’ says the gentle Marquette, ‘leaving us alone, in this unknown land, in the hands of Providence.’

“France and Christianity stood in the valley of the Mississippi.

“Embarking on the broad Wisconsin, the discoverers as they sailed west went solitarily down the stream, between alternate prairies and hill sides, beholding neither man nor the wonted beasts of the forest; no sound broke the appalling silence, but the ripple of their canoe, and the lowing of the buffalo. In seven days ‘they entered happily the Great River with a joy that could not be expressed;’ and the two birch-bark canoes raising their happy sails under new skies and to unknown breezes, floated down the calm magnificence of the ocean stream over the broad, clear sand-bars, the resort of innumerable water-fowl; gliding past islets that swelled