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his men after leaving the falls of the Ohio.

According to the supposed recital of Armand de Bourbon, he had made a long journey from thence by land, the direction of which is not known. He may have been at that time in Kentucky or Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois or Ohio. If he proceeded westerly he was constantly increasing the distance from Montreal, and whether he was north or south of the Ohio it is scarcely credible that he should find his way back alone in the winter of 1669-70. In the spring of 1681 he made that sad trip from "Crèvecoeur" to Niagara, with an Indian and four men, which occupied sixty-five days. It would consume fully as much time to return from the falls of the Ohio. He could not have examined the country near the river, below the falls, or he would not have reported that it is a vast march, with intricate channels, along which it flowed a great distance before uniting in a single bed. He could not have traveled far west of the meridian of the falls without hearing of the Mississippi, and making an effort to reach it, for it was only through this river that he then expected to reach the Red Sea on the route to China.

La Salle could not have explored the falls very minutely, and have spoken of them as very high, nor of the country below as a vast marsh with numerous and intricate channels. If, in his land journey, he had gone in a northwesterly direction, he would have struck the Wabash or its main branches in about one hundred and twenty-five miles. In a southwesterly direction, the Cumberland and the Tennessee are rivers of equal magnitude, the waters of which he must have encountered in a few days' travel.

Whatever Indians he met would be closely questioned, and if they communicated anything, the Great River must have been the first object of their thoughts. An observation of either of these three rivers by La Salle, in the lower part of their course, or even second-hand information respecting them from the savages, must have led a mind so acute as his, sharpened by his purposes and his surroundings, to the conclusion that he was near the Mississippi.

Did he reach this conclusion, and find himself baffled by the clamors or the desertion of his men? Did he find means to procure other men and supplies without returning to Montreal? It appears from the Colone Francaise,' vol. iii, that in the summer of 1671 he had communication with Montreal, where he obtained a credit of 454 livres tournois. Did this enable him to pass from the waters of the Ohio to those of Lake Erie,

and undertake a long cruise through the lakes to the Illinois country? Whatever reply should be made to these queries, it is reasonably evident that when his great work of 1679 was undertaken he did not know that the Ohio is a tributary of the Mississippi, or whether the great unknown river would conduct them to the South. Sea. The discoveries of Joliet in 1673 did not remove these doubts from the minds of the governor-general or the geographers of that period.

La Salle, as late as 1682, after having been at the mouth of the Mississippi, was inclined to the opinion that the Ohio ran into a great (but imaginary) river, called Chucugoa, east of the Mississippi, discharging into the Gulf or the Atlantic in Florida. The French had not followed the Ohio from the falls to its junction with the Wabash. On a map made in 1692, ten years later, the Wabash is equivalent to the lower Ohio, formed by the Miami and the upper Ohio, the Wabash of our maps being omitted.

The main facts which residents of the Ohio valley are most curious to know concerning La Salle's operations here are yet wanting. We have made diligent search for them, and are as yet unable to say, precisely, how much time he spent on the waters of the Ohio and Lake Erie prior to 1673; what trading posts he established, if any; what streams he navigated, or with what tribes he became acquainted. The instructions to Governor-General DuQuesne in 1752, above referred to, claim that the French had occupied this country ever since it was discovered by La Salle. Governor Burnet of the colony of New York, in 1721, states that, three years before, the French had no establishments on Lake Erie.

We may infer that La Salle was busily occupied during the years 1670 and 1671, on the waters of the Ohio and Lake Erie, collecting furs, for he had no other means of support. The credit he obtained at Villemarie in 1671 was payable in furs. If his map should be discovered in some neglected garret in France, we should no doubt find there a solution of many historical difficulties that now perplex us. It was the custom at that time to make very full memoranda on maps, amounting to a condensed report of the author's travels. If this map exists, Europe does not contain a paper of more value to us.

Mr. Shea, whose labors on the history of French occupation have been wonderfully persistent and minute, is of the opinion that we may presume that unauthorized voyageurs, trappers, traders and coureurs des bois, both French and English, were among the Indians in advance of the explorers.

The Dutch on the Hudson, and after 1664 the English, were on good terms with the Iroquois, who carried their wars to Lake Superior and the Mississippi. We have no records of the movements of those half savage traders, except in the case of Etienne Brulé, and that is of little value.

La Salle was probably on the waters of the Ohio when Governor Woods, of the colony of Virginia, sent a party to find that river in September, 1671. This party reached the falls of the Kanawha on the seventeenth of that month, where they found rude letters cut upon standing trees. They took possession of the country in the name of Charles II. of England, and proceeded no farther.—(‘Botts' Journal, New York Colonial Documents,' vol. iii, p. 194). William Penn's colony was not then organized. In 1685 or 1686 some English traders penetrated as far as Mackinaw, by way of Lake Erie. They were probably from New York, and having made their purchases of the Ottawas, returned under the protection of the Hurons or Wyandots, of the west end of Lake Erie.

If the Virginians were engaged in the Indian trade at this early period, their route would be up the Potomac to the heads of the Youghiogheny, and from the forks of the Ohio at Pittsburgh to Lake Erie, by the Allegheny river and French creek, or by way of the Beaver, Mahoning and the Cuyahoga rivers. These Arabs of the forest would carry axes and hatchets having a steel bit, whether Dutch, French or English; and thus may have done the hacking upon our trees which I have described. None of these people would be likely to leave other records of their presence in a country claimed by their different governments, on which one party or the other were trespassers.

I am aware that this presentation of the most interesting period in the history of Ohio is desultory and incomplete. If there had been a reasonable prospect of more facts, it would have been delayed; but it is doubtful if we may expect much more light on the subject of the discovery of the Ohio valley.

CHARLES WHITTLESEY.

GEOGRAPHICAL HISTORY OF OHIO.

When Columbus found America it was supposed he had reached the eastern coast of Asia. As discovery progressed, names intended for that continent were strung along the Atlantic. One of them, the West Indies, to-day reminds us of the error, as well as Indian, the common name for the aborigines.

It was by and by suspected that America was not Asia, but it was a long time before the reality of a vast continent was understood. Suc ceeding learned men made it consist of two very long and narrow bodies of land.

South America, coasted by Cape Horn, was first delineated with some accuracy, but North America not until very much later. The feeble colonies along the Atlantic grew slowly, and not until two hundred and fifty years did they really begin to push over the mountains, and there met other colonies from the interior of the continent. The South Sea trade led to many voyages of discovery, and many energetic captains sailed up and down the coast striving and continually hoping to find some strait to the supposed near coast of Asia.

We, in our day, read the early voyages as if the enterprising men who conducted them were voyaging purely for science and adventure, but, then, as now, business was energetic and commerce was reaching out its hands in every direction for larger profits. Only once did a romantic chevalier search for the visionary fountain of youth, and he may have thought that bottled it would be the most popular of mineral waters and there were "millions in it."

Cartier entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1534, but returned to France to get a new outfit to pursue the new sea channel to the west. The next year he entered the river, but still looked for a passage to Asia. He thought deep Saguenay led to the Northern Sea and continued up the St. Lawrence. Stopped by the rapids he was the first European who made the tour of the mountain and named the place "Mount Royal."

The Indians reported to Cartier that there were three large lakes and a sea of fresh water without end, meaning, no doubt, lakes of middle New York and Ontario sea. Cartier and his king, the Great Francis, supposed he was in Asia.

In a mercator map of 1569, the St. Lawrence is represented draining all the Upper Mississippi valley, while to the northwest is the eastern end of a vast fresh water sea (dulce aquarum) some five hundred or six hundred miles wide, of the extent of which the Indians of Canada, learning of it from the Indians of Saguenay, are ignorant. It looks on the map like Lake Huron, but careful geographers dropped this unfounded report of a great lake, and rightly. The Saguenay Indians no doubt meant the Lake St. John.

Quebec was settled in 1608. In 1615 Champlain reached Lake Huron by way of Ottawa river. On his return he crossed the lower end of Ontario and met in battle the Iroquois. His allies, the Hurons, wished him to wait for five hundred men from the Eries, the tribe from which our lake took its name. His interpreter, Brulé, visited them and descended. the Susquehanna to salt water, and is supposed to have visited the lake, I doubt it. He did not need to cross it to return to the French, and he could hardly have stood on the lake and seen its broad expanse. He reported to Champlain, who, in 1632 made the first map of the lakes. Lake Erie, unnamed, is little but a wide irregular river from Lake Huron, (Mer Douce) to Ontario (Lac St. Louis.) Champlain's ideas of Erie were more likely derived from the north, where Long Point and islands make it look narrower than it does from the south.

The maps of other nations for a long time after show no practical knowledge of the interior, being quite constant differences in grossest blunders. But in the meantime the French-" shut up," says the English geographer, Heylin, "in a few weak forts on the north of Canada, "were really by missionaries and teachers, pushing far into the interior.. The Jesuit map of Lake Superior, of 1671, is wonderful. In a map published by the Royal Geographer Sanson, in Paris in 1669, Lake Erie is not far from its true shape, and lake Chautauqua appears with a small stream —meant, I think, for a little of the Ohio, known from Indian report.

It is worth while to stop for a moment to glance at the then position of Our state. Between it and the east are the Alleghanies, in those days a great natural barrier, and not inaptly called "Endless Mountains." It was to be nearly one hundred years before the whites were to cross them,

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