CHAPTER I. THE OHIO WILDERNESS. In the annals of Obio the middle of the seventeenth century forms the dividing line between history and myth. All beyond that is vague and shadowy. Two hundred and fifty years ago the country now known as Ohio was a primeval wilderness which no white man had ever seen. Except along the southern shores of Lake Erie, where dwelt the Cat Nation of Indians, it was occupied by no fixed inhabitants. During the latter half of the seventeenth century it was a hunting preserve to the various Indian tribes which approached it from the north, south and east.' The authentic descriptions of this primitive solitude are extremely meager. For adequate conceptions of its virginal grandeur, gloom and loveliness, changing with the seasons, and untouched as yet by the hand of man, we are left mainly to the conjurations of our own fancy. La Salle, who was its first white explorer, has left us no record of its physical aspects. Hunters and captives tell us of their adventures, but do not describe the country. We know more of the interior of Africa than they have told us of the vast interior regions west of the Alleghanies. The early travelers and annalists have done little better. They came to view the land not for historical purposes, but to inspect and report its material resources. They have given us glimpses here and there of the external features of the country, but only glimpses. They have at best drawn but the vague outlines of a picture the details of which would now be of intense interest. The Jesuit missionaries who explored the region of the Great Lakes and the Valley of the Mississippi were so absorbed in the work to which they had consecrated their lives, or so occupied with other special purposes set before them, as to have given little thought, apparently, to their unique surroundings. They narrate incidents and experiences with minuteness, but dismiss natural objects with the barest allusion. It is by free interpretation of what they say, rather than by what they have actually said, that we must fill out and perfect our impressions of the great northwestern wilderness. Such interpretation we find in the pages of one of their most accomplished annalists, who has drawn the following Doré-like picture of the primitive Canadian forest: Deep recesses where, veiled in foliage, some wild, shy rivulet steals with timid music through breathless caves of verdure; gulfs where feathered crags rise like castle walls, where the noonday sun pierces with keen rays athwart the torrent and the mossed arms of fallen pines cast wavering shadows on the illumined foam; pools of liquid crystal turned emerald in the reflected green of impending woods; rocks on whose rugged front the gleam of sunlit waters dances in quivering light; ancient trees hurled headlong by the storm to dam the raging stream with their forlorn and savage ruin; or the stern depths of immemorial forests, dim and silent as a cavern, columned with innumerable trunks, each like an Atlas upholding its world of leaves, and sweating perpetual moisture down its dark and channeled rind; some strong in youth, some grisly with decrepit age, nightmares of strange distortion, gnarled and knotted with wens and goitres; roots intertwined beneath like serpents petrified in an agony of contorted strife; green and glistening mosses carpeting the rough ground, mantling the rocks, turning pulpy stumps to mounds of verdure, and swathing fallen trunks as, bent in the impotence of rottenness, they lie outstretched over knoll and hollow, like mouldering reptiles of the primeval world, while around, and on and through them springs the young growth that battens on their decay, the forest devouring its own dead. Or, to turn from its funereal shade to the light and life of the open woodland, the sheen of sparkling lakes, and mountains basking in the glory of the summer noon, flecked by the shadows of passing clouds that sail on snowy wings across the transparent azure.1 The scenes witnessed by Marquette and Joliet while descending the Wisconsin in search of the Mississippi are thus portrayed by the same writer: They glided calmly down the tranquil stream, by islands choked with trees and matted with entangling grapevines; by forests, groves and prairies,-the parks and pleasure grounds of a prodigal nature; by thickets and marshes, and broad, bare sandbars; under the shadowing trees, between whose tops looked down from afar the bold brow of some woody bluff. At night the bivouac,-the canoes inverted on the bank, the flickering fire, the meal of bisonflesh or venison, the evening pipes, and slumber beneath the stars; and when in the morning they embarked again the mist hung on the river like a bridal veil; then meited before the sun, till the glassy water and the languid woods basked breathless in the sultry glare." Another writer tells what these voyagers saw as they descended the Mississippi : 6 Soon all was new; mountain and forest had glided away; the islands with their groves of cottonwood became more frequent, and moose and deer browsed upon the plains; strange animals were seen traversing the river, and monstrous fish appeared in its waters. But they proceeded on their way amid this solitude, frightful by its utter absence of man. Descending still further they came to the land of the bison, or pisikiou, which, with the turkey became the sole tenants of the wilderness; all other game had disappeared.' From Marquette himself we have these striking bits of description : We see nothing but deer and moose, bustards and wingless swans, for they shed their plumes in this country. From time to time we meet monstrous fish, one of which struck so violently against our canoe that I took it for a large tree [probably a catfish] about to knock us to pieces. Another time we perceived on the water a monster with the head of a tiger, a pointed snout like a wildcat's, a beard and ears erect, a grayish head and neck all black. On casting our nets we have taken sturgeon and a very extraordinary kind of fish; it resembles a trout with this difference, that it has a larger mouth but smaller eyes and snout.s "Both sides of the river," continues Marquette, "are lined with lofty woods. The cottonwood, elm and whitewood are of admirable height and size. The numbers of wild cattle we heard bellowing make us believe the prairies near. We saw quails on the water's edge, and killed a little parrot with half the head red, the rest, with the neck, yellow, and the body green." Some of the glorious scenes which Hennepin has faintly described but must have witnessed when he explored the upper Mississippi in 1680, are thus portrayed by his poetic chronicler: The young Mississippi, fresh from its northern springs, unstained as yet by unhallowed union with the riotous Missouri, flowed calmly on its way amid strange and unique beauties; a wilderness clothed with velvet grass; forest-shadowed valleys; lofty heights whose smooth slopes seemed levelled with the scythe; domes and pinnacles, ramparts and ruined towers, |