Read The Great American Steamboat Race Online
Authors: Benton Rain Patterson
The Great American Steamboat Race (4 page)
Alonso Álvarez de Piñeda was the first known European to see the big river. His view of it came from across the rail of a sailing ship as he and his Spanish exploration fleet followed the coast of the Gulf of Mexico in 1519, sailing from Florida, bound for Mexico. Around June 2 he passed the outflow of a mighty stream and he made a note of it in his log and gave it a name — Rio del Espiritu Santo, or Holy Spirit River, because he had sighted it on (or around) the Catholic feast day of Espirito Santo, or Pentecost. But noting and naming it constituted the extent of Álvarez’s interest in the river, and he sailed on to Cabo Rojo, Mexico.
Another Spaniard, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, was the next European to see it. His view was a lot closer up than Álvarez’s. He and his contingent of explorers were traveling cross-country, slogging and plodding their way from Florida toward Mexico, exhausting themselves in the wilds and marshes, amid harassing Indians in Louisiana and Texas. Sometime in 1528 Cabeza de Vaca and his party managed to cross the Mississippi near its mouth and kept going on what was to become an eight-year trek, which only Cabeza de Vaca and three others of his party survived.
Hernando de Soto, another Spanish explorer, made deadly enemies of the Indians in Florida, Alabama and Mississippi and was forced to fight them repeatedly as he and his steadily diminishing army, starting at Tampa Bay, moved up the Florida peninsula into Georgia and South Carolina, then turned west and traversed Alabama and Mississippi, coming at last, perhaps near present-day Greenville, Mississippi, to the banks of the wide and muddy river, which he saw merely as an obstacle on his way to the imagined gold that awaited his looting. He crossed the river and traveled as far as the northwest part of Arkansas before turning around and heading back to the big river. After three years of fruitless searching for treasure, he contracted a disease and died near the banks of the river in June 1542. The few survivors of
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Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet descend the Mississippi River by canoe in 1673. They were the first Europeans to explore the river, seeking to discover where it would take them. Marquette recorded in his journal the name the natives gave the river — Missisipi, as Marquette spelled it, meaning “great river” (Library of Congress).
his army placed his corpse in a hollowed-out tree trunk and sank it in the river, lest the Indians discover that despite what he had told them, he was not immortal after all. The survivors then fled down the river and made their way to Mexico.
A 35-year-old French Jesuit missionary priest, Jacques Marquette — known to history as
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Marquette — and a Canadian-born Jesuit seminary dropout turned explorer, 27-year-old Louis Joliet (or Jolliet), were the first Europeans to actually explore the big river. Unlike the Spaniards who had preceded them, Marquette and Joliet set out not merely to cross the mighty stream but to discover where it would take them — perhaps, they thought, to the Pacific Ocean. Further unlike the Spaniards, they meant to befriend and proselytize the natives they would meet along their way, not conquer and pillage them. It was Marquette, moreover, who recorded in his journal the name the natives had given the big river — Missisipi, as Marquette spelled it, the “great river.”
On May 17, 1673, Marquette and Joliet launched their two canoes into Lake Huron near Michelmackinaw, at the lake’s western end, and with five fellow explorers, all of them half Indian and half French Canadian, began paddling their way westward through the Straits of Mackinac and into Lake Michigan, then along the south shore of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Arriving at the mouth of the Fox River at present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin, Marquette and Joliet ascended the Fox to Lake Winnebago, then continued on to a Mascouten Indian settlement at present-day Berlin, Wisconsin, where they stopped and rested and learned of a portage, farther south, that would lead them to the Wisconsin River, which flows into the Mississippi. Following the Indians’ directions, they crossed overland to the Wisconsin River near Portage, Wisconsin, put their canoes back into the water and traveled downstream to the Wisconsin’s confluence with the Mississippi near Prairie du Chien, reaching the big river on June 17, 1673, exactly a month after their departure.
Days of further travel led Marquette to deduce that, contrary to their hopes, they were not headed toward the Pacific Ocean. “Judging from The Direction of the course of the Missisipi,” he wrote, “if it Continue the same way, we think that it discharges into the mexican gulf.” When the explorers passed what apparently was the mouth of the Missouri River, however, Marquette guessed that that was the river that would take them toward California and in his journal he expressed the hope that he might later explore it.
Marquette and Joliet continued their brave descent of the Mississippi as far as the Arkansas River and there they decided they had gone far enough. They estimated that they were within a few days of the Gulf of Mexico and were fast approaching Spanish-held territory and consequently feared capture or worse.
And so on July 17, 1673, the little party of explorers turned their canoes upriver and started the trip back to the French settlements whence they had come, finally arriving in late 1674 after making several stops along the way. Marquette never got to explore the Missouri. He died in 1675, a victim of dysentery contracted on his historic voyage down the Mississippi. Joliet married shortly after his return. In 1680, as a reward for his service to Canada (or New France), Joliet was granted Anticosti Island, at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. In May 1700 he became lost and died while on an expedition to one of his land holdings.
Rene-Robert Cavelier,
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de La Salle, born in Rouen, France, in 1643, was perhaps the first to see the Mississippi for what it was — a broad highway that, with its tributaries, provided access into the heart of a vast continent teeming with promise and potential. Another dropout from the Jesuit priesthood, he left France to seek a new life in Canada in the spring of 1666, arriving in Quebec in 1667. He managed to acquire a land holding on the western end of the island of Montreal, a section known as Lachine. From the Iroquois natives in the area, whose language he learned, La Salle heard stories of a river called the Ohio that flowed into the great river, the Mississippi. Without the benefit of what
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Marquette and Louis Joliet were later to discover, La Salle leaped to the conclusion that the Mississippi was the hoped-for route to the Pacific Ocean and China and started making plans to explore it.
With a go-ahead from the Canadian governor and after selling Lachine to finance his expedition, La Salle in 1669 set out for the Ohio with a party of fifteen men in five canoes. He claimed to have reached the Ohio and to have followed it as far as present-day Louisville, but he didn’t make it to the Mississippi. His attention was diverted to the establishment of a fur-trading business, at which he became a success. In 1682, apparently bored with the fur business, he had another go at exploring the Mississippi. He launched an expedition of twenty-three Frenchmen and eighteen Indians from Fort Crevecoeur, near present-day Peoria, Illinois, into canoes and descended the Illinois River to the Mississippi and then paddled down the big river to present-day Memphis, where he built a fortification he named Fort Prudhomme. From Memphis he and his party continued down the river all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, stopping at a site near present-day Venice, Louisiana, on April 9, 1682, to plant a marker post and a cross that claimed for France the entire Mississippi River basin, including all the land drained by the big river and its many tributaries. Nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman vividly memorialized the momentous event :
On that day the realm of France received ... a stupendous accession. The fertile plains of Texas; the vast basin of the Mississippi, from its frozen northern springs to the sultry borders of the Gulf ; from the woody ridges of the Alleghanies to the bare peaks of the Rocky Mountains — a region of savannas and forests, sun-cracked deserts and grassy prairies, watered by a thousand rivers, ranged by a thousand warlike tribes, passed beneath the scepter of the Sultan of Versailles; and all by virtue of a feeble human voice, inaudible a half a mile.
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And to that immense, diverse territory La Salle gave a name. He called it Louisiana, in honor of the king of France, Louis XIV.
From the mouth of the Mississippi La Salle returned to Canada and then to France. In 1684 he again left France, this time with four ships and three hundred hopeful emigrants to found a colony on the Gulf of Mexico. The venture suffered a series of disasters, including attacks by pirates and Indians and the woeful consequences of poor navigation that took them farther west than they apparently intended to go. One of the ships was lost to pirates in the West Indies, another sank in an inlet off Matagorda Bay, and the third ran aground at Matagorda Bay. La Salle and the other survivors erected a fortification near present-day Victoria, Texas, and La Salle then led a group on foot to seek out the Mississippi River, a futile effort that ended when the thirtysix surviving members of the expedition mutinied. Four of the mutineers murdered La Salle on March 20, 1687, near present-day Navasota, Texas. The little colony that he had planted was wiped out in 1688 when Indians slaughtered the colony’s twenty adults and carried off their five children as captives.
The intrepid explorers of the Mississippi during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries demonstrated that the big river flowed uninterrupted from high in the continent’s heartland through changing climes to the Gulf of Mexico, the mid-continent’s gateway to the seven seas. But the early explorers never traced the Mississippi northward to its source. That notable deed awaited the coming of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft.
Restless and curious, Schoolcraft disdained staying near home, joining his family’s glassmaking business and leading a conventional life. In 1818, twenty-five years old and still single, he bade his family and friends in Albany, New York, his hometown, goodbye and set off on a journey of exploration that would let him follow his interests in geography, geology and mineralogy. In 1821 he joined an expedition led by General Lewis Cass, probing the upper peninsula of Michigan and northern Minnesota and hoping to discover, among other things, the source of the Mississippi. In Minnesota Cass and his party of explorers found a lake they decided was the river’s headwaters and named it, as something of a memorial, Cass Lake.
Back from that adventure, Schoolcraft took a job as an Indian agent in 1822, stationed at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, at the northeastern tip of the upper peninsula. There he met and married Jane Johnson, daughter of an Irish fur trader and an Ojibway woman, and from her he learned a great deal about Indian culture and language. In 1832, on a mission to smooth over relations between the quarreling Chippewas and the Sioux, he determined that the Mississippi did not originate at Cass Lake and decided to try to find the big river’s true source.
After days of paddling upstream and across lakes and portaging through sandy, brushy, marshy and piney wilderness, Schoolcraft’s party of explorers discovered that the stream of the Mississippi separated into two branches above Cass Lake, something that the available maps failed to show.
The explorers pressed on, wearied by the demands of the portage and stopping often to rest and lay down their burdens for brief respites, and at last came the accomplishment of their arduous mission, recounted by Schoolcraft in his journal:
Every step we made in treading these sandy elevations, seemed to increase the ardor with which we were carried forward. The desire of reaching the actual source of a stream so celebrated as the Mississippi — a stream which La Salle had reached the mouth of, a century and a half (lacking a year) before, was perhaps predominant; and we followed our guide down the sides of the last elevation, with the expectation of momentarily reaching the goal of our journey. What had been long sought, at last appeared suddenly. On turning out of a thicket, into a small weedy opening, the cheering sight of a transparent body of water burst upon our view. It was Itasca Lake — the source of the Mississippi.
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Known to the French as Lac la Biche, the lake, as described by Schoolcraft, was “a beautiful sheet of water, seven or eight miles in extent, lying among hills of diluvial formation, surmounted with pines, which fringe the distant horizon and form an agreeable contrast with the greener foliage of its
immediate shores.” The outlet of the lake, through which it begets the Mississippi River, was ten to twelve feet wide, and the water there, as it poured into a stream, was twelve to eighteen
