Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/309

Rh posts, stretched along the strategic points on the great lakes and at the confluence of the first series of large rivers beyond the Alleghanies. Marquette had discovered the Mississippi, and La Salle had traced it to the salt sea. A Frenchman was the first white man to thread his way to the Rocky Mountains. These lakes and posts had for the most part been occupied by the consent, or at least the tolerance, of the natives, because they supposed that the convenience and benefit of them as trading or mission stations were shared by both races. In strength of muscle, in the strain upon endurance, by which the implements for building and defence were introduced into these depths of the primeval wilderness, was exacted harder toil from the French than the English colonists expended at contemporary periods of their enterprises. As soon as the English by the fortune of war afterwards got possession of these strongholds, they obliterated the names given by their predecessors. Indeed we might say, that, up to the period of our Revolutionary war, the English colonists on the seaboard had done scarce anything in the severer enterprises of exploration. They had, so to speak, used the French trails, and had the benefit in many ways of that experience won by others which is so much cheaper, and often more valuable, than that won by ourselves. The moment now that the modern traveller gets beyond the first ranges of our Western valleys and mountains, air and earth and water, history and tradition, are redolent of the memories of explorers and adventurers who called the monarch of France their sovereign.

All this toil and task-work of exploration and discovery, pursued by dauntless and intrepid men, — men whose life began in the luxuries of courts, and who yet proved themselves equal to an almost superhuman effort and endurance, — was undergone for a purpose: it was in the service of their beloved France, her adored glory and sanctity as a servant of the Church. If a passing glance of a