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on the advance guard. In the surprise and desperate fight that ensued 2,500 of the natives are said to have been killed. The Europeans conquered after a struggle of nine hours, during which the town was fired, the baggage consumed, and many men and horses killed. The conquerors were in bad plight. The aim of the promising expedition had failed, the provisions and baggage were mostly lost, and only hostility could be expected from the Indians in the future.

It was now October, 1540. De Soto had been about a year and four months in the country, and his vessels, with supplies, lay in Pensacola Bay, not far from a hundred miles distant. But De Soto was worthy of being called the peer of Cortez and Pizarro. If unflinching determination and cruel bravery could have given him success, he must have gained it. His followers were discouraged, and wished to abandon a hopeless quest. To go to his vessels was to renounce the chance of fame and riches; he determined to turn his back on supplies and home, and make a fresh attempt. His stern decision subdued discontent and awakened confidence; his followers submitted to his will and followed him to the northwest. He spent the winter in Mississippi, where a night attack of the Indians surprised his troops in their beds, their light cabins were set on fire at the first onset, and many escaped only with their lives.

Their means of protection and defense were now greatly reduced, but, repairing the damage, as far as possible, they wore away the winter in frequent contests with the natives, whom they despoiled of food to sustain themselves. In the spring De Soto resumed his route, crossed the Mississippi in the neighborhood of Memphis, his force still sufficiently formidable for self-protection. They were the first Europeans who beheld the Great River. De Soto wandered over the western Valley, in search of a people worthy to be conquered, for a year, in vain. He pushed far back in Arkansas and to

the borders of Missouri, and returned, broken in health and sick at heart at the failure of all his hopes, to die on the banks of the Mississippi, May 21, 1542. His diminished and disheartened followers now thought of nothing but how to escape with life from the fatal Valley. They first sought to reach Mexico by land, but found the difficulties so great that they soon returned to the river, built boats, in which they descended to the Gulf, and coasted along Texas to the settlements of their countrymen. Of the army, nearly a thousand strong, which had landed in Florida, three hundred and eleven escaped the perils of the wilderness, the vengeance of the Indians, whose retaliation they had provoked, and the dangers of the Gulf.

About twenty years later St. Augustine was founded, and in the course of time settlements were commenced in Texas; but these were more for purposes of barter with the natives and to shut out other European nations, by taking nominal possession, than from a real design of actual occupation and use. The disastrous termination of the two expeditions-of Narvaez and De Soto-convinced the Spaniards that there was no civilization worthy to be overthrown, and no considerable amount of gold within reach in the Valley. The real wealth of the Valley had no attractions to them. It did not encourage those who sought unlawful gains, and its savage tribes refused to become slaves. Thus, the old immoralities and evils of European life took no root here. The resources of this region. could be really developed only by an industrious and thrifty people, at first almost entirely agricultural. Any other must have but a slight and temporary hold upon it. When the right people came it gave them more than the wealth of the Indies.

CHAPTER III.

THE FRENCH IN NORTH AMERICA IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

While the Spanish were following up their conquests and discoveries of wealth, from Mexico to Chili, by a severity of rule that soon destroyed the blooming civilizations they had found, Europe was passing through an important change. The germs of a new learning and wisdom had matured very significant fruit, and the seventeenth century gave evident signs of the near approach of a new and more perfect development of civilization. The institutions and habits inherited from the past still embarrassed some forms of this growth in the Old World, and many sought both religious and civil liberty on the New Continent. The English colonies along the Atlantic coast laid the foundation of new institutions early in the seventeenth century, which were to be fully organized late in the eighteenth, one hundred and fifty years after.

Changes among the Anglo-Saxons were the measured and consistent result of tendencies firmly established in their character, and developed from the primitive institutions of the race. They reached a late but most noble maturity. The French, on the contrary, were quick to respond to a new movement or tendency from without, and, for the time, became its most complete embodiment. Rapid in thought and enthusiastic in following out a theory to the farthest results permitted by circumstances, the pulse of change was always first felt by them, and its direction indicated more clearly than by any other European nation. Anglo-Saxons were averse to change until all was ripe for it; the French at once discarded as much of the old as possible, and quickly adjusted themselves to the new-putting theory into practice with rapid completeness. They were the first in the eighth century

to catch the spirit of a new modern civilization, and hastened to organize it in the great empire of Charlemagne. When the concentration of power in a single administration was interrupted by the growth of Feudalism, they developed that system in greater completeness than in any other country in Europe; when the strengthening of the royal power was required to overcome the abuses of that system, the French king became soonest an absolute ruler; and when theories of republican liberty were promulgated in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the eagerness of the French people to embody them overthrew the throne, the nobility and the priesthood by one vast explosion.

This French habit of catching the first breath of social and political or other change, reducing it to a consistent system, and at once seeking the end with too little regard to the means, was very characteristically shown in America in the seventeenth century by many of the most prominent representatives of that nation who visited the New World. The plans of Champlain, and of the French Jesuits who accompanied him, at once took in all of the continent with which they were acquainted, and which they thought it desirable to control. Instead of building up quietly and solidly on the coast, as did the English, their first care was to penetrate to the interior and form relations with the Indian tribes nearly a thousand miles from the sea. Important missions, that had a political as well as a religious aim, were immediately commenced on Lake Huron, above the western center of the Valley, to which the English did not attempt to penetrate for more than a hundred years.

The Age of Physical Force had culminated in Europe, and the Age of Mental Force began to dawn. As usual, the

French at once recognized the new tone, and became its first eminent representatives. The system of the Jesuits was one remarkable form under which mental and moral force was first substituted for physical coercion. The nation which, in

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the last half of the sixteenth century, produced the horrors of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, in the first half of the seventeenth, adopted a mild and humane Indian policy that made almost every red man their friend, and furnished a long list of Jesuit missionaries, animated with the lofty spirit of martyrs. They shrunk from no dangers or sufferings, and calmly submitted to the cruelest tortures and death, to which, indeed, they looked forward when going hundreds of miles from all civilized companionship, among the most ruthless of mankind.

This spirit in the French commanders and priests was precisely the opposite of that which had moved the same classes of Spaniards in the previous century, and, usually, in the long run, secured the absolute trust and devotion of the Indian tribes. It was in this spirit that the French undertook the exploration of the Mississippi Valley, about the year 1673. The Jesuit missionaries had, some time before, established missions near the outlet of Lake Superior and on Green Bay. Marquette, a French priest, accompanied by Joliet, a trader, and five other Frenchmen, aided by the Indians of Green Bay, carried two frail Indian canoes across the portage separating the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers, and floated down the latter stream to the Mississippi, undeterred by the earnest remonstrances of the Indians, who represented that they were rushing into unknown but terrible dangers. They were the first white men to furrow the upper waters of the Great River.

Amazed, delighted yet awed by the vast and magnificent solitude, they descended the river to the Arkansas, not far from where the unfortunate, but ruthless, De Soto had met his fate and been buried in its waters. They discovered no traces of men on the way until they reached the lower boundary of Iowa. Here a pathway showed signs of human presence. They came as friends to the Indians of the Valley; for it was the principle of the French in America through this century to make the red men their allies and aids. They