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EAR the thirty-fourth parallel of north latitude, in the year 1541, Ferdinand de Soto and his companions reached and discovered the Mississippi River. This was doubt less the first expedition ever made by white men into the great central valley of North America. But the visionary and imaginative Spaniards wasted their efforts in a vain search. for El Dorados, or the fountain of perpetual youth; and, apart from the establishment of the first settlement in the United States at St. Augustine, in 1565. Their discoveries and explorations, from the beginning to near the close of the sixteenth century, were barren of important results in the history of this country.

But there was a nation which looked with practical gaze upon the newly-discovered world and sought to make at least a part of it their own. The French were among the earliest adventurers in the new land, and their efforts to explore and colonize it were most active and energetic. But it was not until near the middle of the seventeenth century that the French were led to explore the region of the great lakes, and then religious zeal was the only inspiration of the explorers. Lake Superior was visited in 1641 by Charles Raymbault, the first of the missionary explorers of the Northwest. During the next thirty years, the Jesuits continued their explorations with great diligence and activity, establish

ing missions at various points north of the lakes, also in Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois.

Joliet and Marquette, the former a Quebec merchant, and the latter a Jesuit missionary, in 1673 explored the country about the northern lakes, passed from Green Bay up the Fox and down the Wisconsin River into the Mississippi, and explored that river as far as the mouth of the Arkansas, returning by the Illinois and Chicago rivers to Lake Michigan.

It is the unanimous opinion of the chief historians of the country that Robert Chevalier La Salle was the first white man to explore the beautiful stream now known as the Ohio, and the first to tread the soil of the great State named from the river. The earliest explorers of the Mississippi region considered the Ohio and Wabash as one stream, and gave the name Ouabache to both.

La Salle was born in France in 1635, and educated for the priesthood; but his adventurous spirit would not brook the seclusion of the cloister. He came to Canada in 1666 and plunged boldly into the wilderness to make a name as an explorer. Soon after we find him among the Seneca Indians of New York, seeking a guide to lead him into the country of the Delawares. Successful in his quest - having obtained a Shawnee prisoner by gifts to the Senecas he set out upon his hazardous expedition. As the records of three years of his wanderings are lost to the world, there is no direct evidence as to the route which he took to reach and explore the Ohio River.

Several Ohio writers have asserted, with some showing of probability, that after proceeding up Lake Erie to the mouth of the Cuyahoga he followed that river to the portage and reached the Ohio by the Tuscarawas and the Muskingum. It is generally agreed that the time of his journey was the winter of 1669-70. Others maintain that La Salle crossed Lake Erie to the Maumee, and came to the Ohio by that stream and the Miami. But the weight of historical evidence supports the generally accepted and more probable theory that he journeyed from the Seneca country to the Allegheny, and down that river to the Ohio, whence he explored its chief tributaries. Hence, although he may not have reached the Ohio by way of the Muskingum, it is very likely that he explored the latter stream during some part of his three years of wandering.

In 1679, La Salle, who was then at the French post of Fort Frontenac, on Lake Ontario, built and launched upon Lake Erie the Griffin, a bark of sixty ton's burden, the first vessel that ever navigated the waters of the lake; sailed across Lakes Erie and Huron to the Straits of Mackinac, and thence to Green Bay. From this point he sent back the Griffin with a cargo of furs, and, accompanied by Father Louis Hennepin (a Franciscan monk) and fourteen other men, journeyed farther into the wild and unknown region. They proceeded in canoes by way of the St. Joseph, Kankakee and Illinois rivers to Peoria Lake, in the vicinity of which La Salle erected a fort and