and timber, carried down by the force of the current." Here the Spaniards prepared boats, and crossed the Mississippi; and, after wandering through the territories of various tribes, the most of whom were hostile, encamped for the winter at Utianque, on the Arkansas, near the western border of that State.

De Soto's spirit was broken by misfortune, and, in utter despair of finding either the gold or the glory he coveted, he resolved to seek again the Mississippi, and, if possible, the sea. Accordingly, early in the spring he set out, and, after long and tedious marches, reached the great river at Guachoya, about twenty miles below the mouth of the Arkansas. Thence he sent a party to seek the sea. After an absence of eight days, they returned and reported that they had advanced only fifteen leagues, on account of the great windings of the river, and the swamps and torrents with which it was bordered. Their report broke the spirit of De Soto. Despair seized his mind, disease attacked his frame, and, on the 21st of May, 1542, he died, and his body was sunk in the Mississippi. Luis de Moscoso succeeded to the command. Hearing vague rumors of Spaniards to the west, he set out in June, with the remains of the army, to the westward, in the hope of reaching Mexico. For three months they wandered, and passed at length over immense plains, covered with buffaloes, to a desert at the base of a range of high mountains. Wearied and dispirited, they turned their course, and reached the Mississippi above the mouth of the Arkansas. Here they wintered again, and prepared to descend the stream in the spring to the sea. Timber was found in the forests. All their iron implements, even to the fetters of their slaves, were wrought into nails. Grass served them for ropes. And thus they built seven small vessels, and, on the 2d of July, 1543, they embarked and followed the river, for twenty days, to its mouth, continually harassed by the Indians; and thence sailed along the coast fifty days, to the westward, and at length arrived at the Spanish settlement of Panuco.

And thus ended the great expedition. De Soto wandered over a great part of the continent in quest of wealth and fame; and found nothing so great as his grave. Of that chosen band of cavaliers, so brilliant and so confident, that followed him, scarcely three hundred, naked, battered and famishing, returned to ask the charity of their countrymen. The career of Spanish conquest to the northward was effectually checked. And but for the motives that religious and national hatred supplied, Florida might have remained unoccupied and unexplored. To furnish an asylum for his perse

cuted countrymen of the Reformed faith, Admiral Coligni projected a colony in the New World; and, on the 18th of February, 1562, he sent out John Ribault, with a colony of French Calvinists.* A settlement was made below the Cambahee, named Carolana; and Ribault, leaving his colony, returned to France. Discontent sprung up, a mutiny ensued, and the settlement was abandoned. Two years later, another colony was sent out under the worthy Laudonnierre; and, on the river of May, with psalms and thanksgiving, they laid the foundations of what they hoped would be a secure retreat for the people of God. But the information was conveyed to Spain that a band of heretics had located themselves within the limits of the empire; and, in 1565, Pedro Melendez de Aviles was sent out by the king, with orders to exterminate them. On St. Augustine's day he landed on the coast, built a fort that yet perpetuates, in the name of the chief city of Florida, the day of its foundation, and from thence, marching secretly and rapidly by land, he surprised the Huguenot settlement of Carolana, and massacred the inhabitants, without distinction of age or sex. Ribault was at sea; when he returned he was induced, with his companions, to surrender, upon the faith of the oath of Melendez. They gave up their arms, and were massacred. The crime was soon avenged. Dominic de Gourges, a Catholic of Gascony, once himself the victim of Spanish cruelty, burned with the desire of avenging his countrymen. For this purpose he fitted out an expedition, approached the coast, surprised and stormed the Spanish forts, put their inhabitants to the sword, and hanged their leaders on the same trees on which some of the French had been hanged. Melendez returned, repaired his posts, fortified St. Augustine, and governed his colony for ten years.

For a century the Spaniards made no further progress in the colonization of Florida. A few scattered missions, indeed, were established, and a religious province, named St. Helena, was chartered by the Holy See, and placed under the care of the Franciscan monks. The whole of Florida, with its vague limits, was attached to Mexico; but of the results of the great expeditions, and of the great sacrifices, of the heroic age of Spanish enterprise, there remained only the colony of St. Augustine.

* A catalogue of the authorities in regard to the Huguenot and Spanish settlements in Florida, may be found in Sparks' American Biography.

The French made early and more successful attempts to explore and colonize the New World.* In 1535, James Cartier entered and explored the St. Lawrence to the Isle of Orleans; and, six years later, in conjunction with Roberval, led out a colony to that region, which he named New France. It failed, and for sixty years no further effort at colonization in America was made; but, in 1608, Samuel Champlain brought out a colony to the Isle of Orleans, and laid the foundation of the city of Quebec, and, five years later, of Montreal. In the same year of his arrival, Champlain, to secure the friendship of the Indians inhabiting the banks of the St. Lawrence, accompanied them in an expedition against their enemies, on the shores of the lake that bears his name. The allies gained a victory over their foes; and that event secured for three generations the alliance of the Algonquins, and the implacable hatred of the Iroquois. This fact determined the course of French exploration. The Iroquois confederacy, powerful in their union, and more powerful from the firearms they obtained from the Dutch, effectually barred the progress of the French traders and missionaries to the south, while their alliance with the Algonquins of the east, secured to them the friendship of the Algonquins of the west. Accordingly, very early explorations were made in the direction of the great western lakes.

In 1616, Le Caron, a Franciscan, the companion of Champlain, penetrated the wilderness to the waters of Lake Huron; and, along with Viel and Sagard, labored for ten years as a missionary among the tribes there and on the Niagara. The purposes of Champlain were more religious than commercial; he esteemed "the salvation of a soul worth more than the conquest of an empire;" his charter recognized the Indian convert as a citizen of France, and the Franciscans were chosen to conduct his missions. As elsewhere, however, the more active order of the Jesuits took possession of the missions, and, in 1634, Brebœuf and Daniel, and later, Lallemand, passed by way of the Ottawa to Lake Huron and to the Sault Ste. Marie,† and established at St. Joseph, St. Louis, and St. Ignatius, villages of Christian Hurons. In 1640, Raymbault and Pigart followed, and in the next year roamed as missionaries with the Hurons of Lake Nipissing. Later in the same year, Raymbault and Jogues passed, in a birch canoe, around the north shore of Lake Huron to the Sault Ste. Marie, met there a council of the Chippewas, and learned

Bancroft, vol. 3.

+ Falls of the river St. Mary's, between Lakes Superior and Huron.

of the Nadouessies or the Sioux, who dwelt eighteen days' journey west of the great lake. But the path of those early missionaries was beset with peril and suffering. In the next year, Jogues and Bressani were captured by the Iroquois, and tortured; in 1648, St. Joseph was destroyed, and Daniel slain; and, in 1649, St. Louis and St. Ignatius were taken, and Brebœuf and Lallemand burned by the same relentless foes. But the French enterprise and the Catholic zeal were not checked. In 1660, Rene Mesnard was sent out to the far west. He passed around the south shore of Lake Superior, gathered a church at the bay of St. Theresa, and on his way from thence to the bay of Chegoimegon, was lost in the forest, at the portage of Kewenaw; and his cassock and breviary were found long after among the Sioux.

Meanwhile, a change was made in the government of the colony. The company of the hundred associates, that had ruled it since 1632, resigned its charter; new France passed to the company of the West Indies. In 1665, Tracy was made viceroy, Courcelles governor, and Talon intendent.* The Jesuit missions were taken under the care of the new government; and Claude Allouez was sent out in the same year, by way of the Ottawa, to the far west. Reaching the Sault Ste. Marie, he passed around the south shore of Lake Superior, and landed at the bay of Chegoimegon. There, at the chief village of the Chippewas, he established a mission, and made, on behalf of the colony, an alliance with them, the Pottawattamies, Sacs and Foxes, and the Illinois, against the Iroquois. In the next year, he passed with the Ottawas to the north shore, and at the western extremity of the lake met the Sioux, and from them learned of a great river flowing to the south, which they called "Messipi." Thence he returned to Quebec to seek more laborers. In 1668, Claude Dablon and Jaques Marquette repaired to the Sault, and established the mission of Ste. Marie; and during the next five years Allouez, Dablon and Marquette explored the regions south of Superior, and west of Michigan, and established the missions of Chegoimegon, St. Marie, Mackinaw, and Green Bay. The purpose of exploring the Mississippi sprang from Marquette himself; but it was furthered by the plans of the intendent Talon, to extend the power of France to the west. In 1670, Nicholas Perot was sent to the west to propose a congress of the tribes of the lakes. In May, 1671, the great council was held at

* The duties of intendent included a supervision of the policy, justice, and finance of the province.

Sault Ste. Marie; the cross was set up, by its side a column inscribed with the lilies of the Bourbons, the Vexilla Regis was chanted, and the nations of the north-west, with all the pomp of the feudal age, were taken into the alliance and under the protection of France. Talon was not satisfied with mere display. There were three opinions in regard to the course of the great river, of which Allouez had heard that it ran to the south-east into the Atlantic, below Virginia—that it flowed into the Gulf of Mexico-and that it emptied into the Gulf of California, and opened a highway to China and the East. To determine this problem, to secure the lands through which it flowed to France, and thus to signalize the close of his administration, Talon approved the purpose of Marquette, and directed him, with M. Joliet, of Quebec, to explore the Mississippi.

On the 13th of May, 1673,* Marquette, Joliet and five voyageurs embarked in two birch canoes at Mackinaw, and passed down the lake. The first tribe they visited were the Folles Aviones, or nation of Wild Oats, now known as the Menomonies, living around the north shore of the Bay of Puans, or Green Bay. These Indians, with whom Marquette was previously acquainted, were informed of their plan of exploration and begged them to desist. There were Indians, they said, on that great river, who would cut off their heads without the least cause; warriors who would seize them; monsters who would swallow them, canoes and all; even a demon, who shut the way, and buried in the waters that boil about him, all who dared draw nigh; and, if these dangers were passed, there were heats there that would infallibly kill them.† "I thanked them for their good advice," says Marquette, "but I told them I could not follow it; since the salvation of souls was at stake, for which I should be overjoyed to give my life." Passing through Green Bay, they entered Fox river, and toiling over stones which cut their feet, as they dragged their canoes through its strong rapids, reached a village where lived in union the Miamis, Mascoutens,‡ and "Kikabeux" (Kicka

* Marquette's Journal in French's Historical collections of Louisiana, Part 2. †The allusion here is to the legend of the Piasa-or the monster bird that devoured men, of which some rude Indian paintings were seen thirty years since on the cliffs above the city of Alton; and Indians as they passed in their canoes made offerings, by dropping tobacco and other articles, valuable in their estimation, in the river.

In Charlevoix's time these occupied the country from the Illinois to the Fox river of Wisconsin, and from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi.-See his Map.