It is true that De Soto, in that fool-hardy and unfortunate expedition that has added a thriliing chapter to American history, had 130 years before discovered the lower Mississippi, but it seems never to have been revisited, and the very knowledge of it had died out. For seven days more the joyous adventurers floated down its broad bosom, following its gentle curves, before they saw a single human being. The scenery has changed; the islands are more beautiful; there is little wood and no hills. Deer, moose, bustards and wingless swans abound. As they descend, the turkey takes the place of smaller game and the buffalo of other beasts.

Although the solitude becomes almost insupportable and they long to see other human faces beside their own, yet they move with caution. They light but little fire at night on the shore, just to prepare a meal, then move as far from it as possible, anchor their canoes in the stream, and post a sentinel to warn them of approaching danger. Finally, on the 26th of June, they discover footprints by the waterside and a well-beaten trail leading off through a beautiful prairie on the west bank. They are in the region of the wild and dreaded Dacotahs, and they conclude that a village is at hand. Coolly braving the danger, Marquette and Joliet leave their canoes in charge of the men. They take to the trail, and in silence for two leagues they follow its gentle windings until they come in sight of three Indian villages. Having committed themselves to God and implored His help, they approach so near they hear the conversation without being discovered, and then stop and announce their presence by a loud outcry. The Indians rush from their cabins, and, seeing the unarmed travelers, they after a little depute four old men to approach them, which they do very slowly. Father Marquette inquires who they are, and is rejoiced to learn that they are Illinois. He can speak to them in their own language. They offer the pipe of peace, which is here first called

the calumet. They are most graciously received at the first village. An old man, perfectly naked, stands at the cabin door with his hands raised towards the sun, and exclaims; "How beautiful is the sun, O Frenchman, when thou comest to visit us. Our town awaits thee, and thou shalt enter all our cabins in peace." There was a crowd of people,who devoured them with their eyes. They had never before seen a white man. As the travelers passed to another village to visit the chief sachem, the peo ple ran ahead, threw themselves on the grass nt by the wayside and awaited their coming, and then again ran ahead to get a second and third opportunity to gaze at them. After several days' stay with this kind and hospitable people, our adventurers pass down the stream as far as Arkansas, when, finding that they could not with safety proceed any farther, on the 17th of July, just one month after entering the Mississippi and two months after leaving Mackinaw, they commenced retracing their steps. They ascend the beautiful Illinois River, which is now for the first time navigated by civilized man. They are delighted at the fertility of the soil, with the beautiful prairies and charming forests, which swarm with wild. cattle, stag, deer, bustards, swans, ducks, and parrots. They stop at an Illinois town of seventy-four cabins, and Father Marquette promises to return and instruct them in the truths of religion. One of the chiefs with his young men escort the company to the lake at Chicago, and they return to Green Bay.

Thus ended that delightful voyage that added the region of the Upper Mississippi to the geography of the known world, and gave to France advantages which, had they not been prodigally thrown away in the wicked folly of the reign of Louis XV., might have given to America a widely different history. Joliet, with his journal and maps, passed on to Quebec, but lost all his papers before reaching there by the capsizing of his canoe. Marquette remained at Green Bay to recruit from a disease brought on by his exhausting toils and his many exposures. many exposures. From here he forwarded a report of his journey to his Superior, drawn up with admirable clearness and a genuine modesty that became his magnanimous soul. The map accompanying the report, prepared as it was without surveys and without instruments, is wonderful for its accuracy of outline.

Indeed, this may be said of most of the maps of this period drawn by the Jesuits, who, while they seemed to have mainly in view the conversion of the savages, yet proved themselves to be the most valuable of discoverers and the most careful of observers.

It was not until late in October, 1674, that Marquette was so far recruited as to attempt to perform his promise to the Illinois. He then left Green Bay with two French voyageurs for his companions, but before he reached Chicago by the slow process of coasting the shores of a stormy lake at an inclement season, his disease, a chronic dysentery, returned upon him with its full force. The streams by which he expected to reach his mission ground were frozen, and he was all too weak to go by land; and here, then a solitude but where now stands a city of seven hundred thousand inhabitants, alone with his two voyageurs, in a rude cabin which afforded but a slender protection from the inclemencies of the season, in feeble health, living on the coarsest food, with a consciousness that he was never to recover, he passed the long winter of 1674–75.

He spent much time in devotion, beginning with the exercises of St. Ignatius, saying mass daily, confessing his companions twice a week and exhorting them as his strength allowed; earnestly longing to commence his mission among his beloved Illinois, yet cheerfully resigned to the will of God. After a season of special prayer that he might so far recover as to take possession of the land of the Illinois in the name of Christ, his strength increased, and on the 29th of March he left his solitary and desolate wintering-place and in ten days reached his destination. He found the Illinois to the number of six hundred fires, awaiting hist arrival. They received him with unbounded joy as an angel from heaven come to teach them "the prayer," and after much private teaching and exhortation to the principal chiefs and from cabin to cabin, he gathered them in grand concourse, and there, on a lovely April day, upon a beautiful open plain, with thousands of the tawny sons and daughters of the prairie hanging upon his lips, the dying man preached to them Christ and Him crucified. His persuasive words were received with universal approbation, but his rapidly failing strength warned him that his own days were numbered. He desired to reach his former

mission of St. Ignatius at Mackinaw before his departure, to die with his religious brethren and leave his bones amongst his beloved Hurons. He promised the Illinois that some other teacher of "the prayer" should take his place and continue the mission, and bade them a loving and regretful farewell. They escorted him with great barbaric pomp, contending with one another for the honor of carrying his little baggage. baggage. For many days, accompanied only by his two voyageurs, he coasted in his frail canoe along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, his strength rapidly failing and his precious life ebbing away. He became helpless, and was lifted like a child into and from the canoe. His vision, too, failed; but his gentleness, his cheerful joy in the prospect before him, his calm trust in God, never faltered. Daily he recited his breviary. He encouraged his companions and exhorted them to put confidence in the God of their salvation, who would not forsake them. They read to him, at his request, a meditation on death which he had long before prepared for this eventful hour. Often did he with hopeful voice exclaim: "I know that my Redeemer liveth.” On the evening before his death, with a face radiant with joy, he told his companions that on the morrow he should die. Calmly and sweetly, as if talking of the death of another, he gave directions as to the disposition of his body. On the following day as he approached the mouth of a river, he pointed out the place of his burial on an eminence on its banks. nence on its banks. The weather was propitious and the voyageurs passed on; but a wind arose, and they were driven back to the river's mouth, which they entered. He was carried on shore, a fire was kindled, a slight shelter of bark raised and he was laid upon the sand. Here he gave his last instructions, thanked his followers for their faithful and loving service, administered to them the rites of their religion, sent by them his last kind message to his religious brethren, and bade them go and take their rest until his final hour should come. After two or three hours and as he was about to enter his agony, he called them, gave them a last embrace, asked for the holy water, handed one of them his crucifix from his neck, asking him to hold it before him, and with his eye fixed sweetly upon it pronounced his profession of faith, and thanked God that He had granted him the grace to die a missionary of the cross

in a foreign land alone. As his spirit was about to pass, one of his companions cried aloud: "Jesus! Marie!" Aroused by the sound he repeated the words, and as if some glorious object appeared to him, he fixed his dying gaze above and beyond the crucifix, and with a countenance all beaming with a holy rapture, his soul departed without a struggle as gently as if he had fallen asleep.

Thus, on the 18th day of May, 1675, at the age of thirty-eight, after nine years of faithful service in the missionary field, Father Marquette departed; and like his great model, the Apostle to the Indies, he died upon a desolate beach, and like him his dying hour was illuminated by a radiance from above. The little stream upon whose banks he breathed his last, still bears his honored name, and there will ever be connected with that spot tender remembrances and hallowed associations. In 1821 our own revered Father Richard paid to it a loving pilgrimage, and erected thereon a wooden cross with an inscription traced in rude characters with a penknife-in its crude simplicity, fit tribute from fit man. But no enduring marble is required to preserve in fresh fragrance the memory of his virtues. His is one of those few, those immortal names, that were not born to die. His mortal remains do not repose in their original resting-place. Two years after his death, the Indians belonging to his mission of St. Ignatius, returning from their winter hunting-grounds, stopped at his grave, sought his remains, and, according to an Indian custom, cleaned his bones, placed them reverently in a box of birchen bark, and then in a mournful procession the thirty canoes moved on toward Mackinaw. Before reaching the mission they were met by Fathers Pierson and Nouvelle, and all the Indians at the mission, who came out to pay a fond tribute to their best beloved missionary. There the solemn De Profundis was intoned, and then with all appropriate rites the precious remains were deposited in the church. The mission was subsequently moved to old Mackinaw, the rude church has long since disappeared, and the precise spot where the remains of Father Marquette now lie mingled with the common dust is not known.

When Marquette left the Sault for La Pointe in 1669, the wise and even Gallic Dablon, then principal of all the Ottawa missions, as the

missions of the Upper Lakes were named, was in charge of the mission at that point. He was succeeded by Father Dreuillettes, who, full of sanctity and zeal, labored there with most wonderful success for nine years. Large numbers were baptized, and in general council the Indians adopted the God of prayer as their God. Here in 1671 an envoy of the French, accompanied by French soldiers, gathered a grand council of all the northwestern tribes and formally took possession of all the land between Montreal and the South Sea, and Allouez made that remarkable and well-known speech to the Indians in praise of the greatness of the French King, and from that time the Sault became a military post. When Marquette left Mackinaw for his great discovery in 1673, Father Pierson was left in charge, and was there in 1677, when he was joined by Father Nouvelle. The mission was a very prosperous one. At what time it was moved across the straits to the site of old Mackinaw and that became a military post, I am unable to say, but it must have been about this time (1677). In 1694, when De la Motte Cadillac, the founder of Detroit, was placed in command, Mackinaw was one of the largest villages in Canada. There was a fine fort of pickets, sixty houses, two hundred soldiers, and many other residents. But with the foundation of Detroit in 1701, Mackinaw dwindled into comparative insignificance. Cadillac, a man of great energy and address, drew away most of the Indians, both Ottawas and Hurons; and so complete was the desertion that in 1706 the missionaries, discouraged by this desertion and the licentiousness of the coureurs de bois, abandoned the post and burned their church. But the French Government would not permit the post to be abandoned, and with the promise of protection the missionaries returned.

Although Detroit was founded in 1701, Ι have been unable to find any record of a Jesuit stationed at this point previous to 1732. Cadillac, although a zealous Catholic, was a bitter enemy of the Jesuits. He had quarreled with them on the brandy question when he was in command at Mackinaw, from 1694 to 1697, and in receiving the personal orders from Count Ponchartrain to establish Detroit, he frankly told the Minister that the Jesuits were his personal enemies and would thwart his objects. He quarreled with Father Vaillant, who ac

companied him on his first expedition, charging him with treachery; and his successful efforts in drawing away the Indians from Mackinaw still further embittered the controversy with the Jesuits. He glories in his success in a spirit not eminently Christian. In a dispatch to the French Minister, 1705, after boasting of the arrival of thirty Hurons from Mackinaw, he says: "There remain only about twenty-five. Father Carheil, who is a missionary there, remains always firm. I hope this fall to pluck out the last feather in his wing, and I am persuaded that this obstinate old priest will die in his parish without a having a single parishioner to bury him."

Yet he seems to wonder that the Jesuits were not his friends and says: "I do my best to make the Jesuits my friends, wishing truly to be theirs; but if I dare say it, all impiety apart, it would be better to speak against God than against them, because on the one side a person might receive His pardon, but on the other the offense, even though doubtful, is never forgiven in this world, and would not be forgiven in the other if their credit was as good there as it is in this country."

It is not wonderful, with this feeling on the part of the Commandant, that Detroit was served by the Recollects rather than by the Jesuits. When Charlevoix was there in 1721 there was no missionary among the Indians at that place, but he says measures were to be taken to supply them with one.

It would be a grateful task, did time permit, to dwell upon the labors and characters of those Jesuits who were the compeers of Marquette such men as Allouez, Dreuillettes, Dablon, and Nouvelle. But with these men passed away the golden age of the Jesuits in the Northwest. They were among the best fruits of that wonderful system that for a century and a half made the Order of Jesus one of the great powers of the world. They were placed in circumstances that developed in an extraordinary degree many of the best results of that training and discipline instituted by Loyale, without at the same time bringing forth those bitter evils that are among its natural fruits. They exhibited great learning, a high self-control, an inflexibility of purpose, an enduring constancy, an unwearied patience in toil and hardship, a calm courage that despised danger and triumphed over intensest suffering, a fervent zeal and an

earnestness of devotion that find few parallels in history. They did not develop, nor did the circumstances of the situation tend to develop, that bitter intolerance, that hatred of civil and religious freedom, that passion for intrigue, that systematic treachery, that insatiate lust of power, and that unscrupulous and cruel abuse of power when obtained, that marked the Jesuits of Europe and aroused against them the deep indignation of Protestant and Catholic christendom, that led to their expulsion from the most enlightened Catholic kingdoms in Europe and their suppression by the Pope himself.

But the influences that were already operating in the courts of Europe and undermining the Jesuitical power there, began to be felt in the wilds of Canada. Colbert, the great Minister of the Grand Monarch, liked them not, and Frontenac cordially hated them. From 1671 to 1681, and from 1689 to his death in 1698, he was at the head of affairs in Canada. The Recollects, whom he favored, were re established in the New World. Jealousies and dissensions arose, and in a thousand ways the plans and purposes of the Jesuits were thwarted. Special efforts were made to ruin their influence at court. It is a curious study to read the voluminous dispatches dispatches that passed between Canada and the court of France. Louis XIV. was at the very culmination of power, in the full exercise of that centralized absolutism founded by Richelieu and perfected by himself. He was as minutely informed of the transactions of an insignificant post on the watery wastes of Lake Superior as if they were taking place on the banks of the Seine; and the most minute orders issued from his ministers, and sometimes from himself, in relation to these distant places. Thus, in 1707 Detroit was a distant and insignificant post with some thirty soldiers. A complaint is made at Versailles that De la Motte Cadillac is trading in brandy and making a great profit thereon. An inquiry is made into the subject, and amid the great affairs of state involving the welfare of France and the destinies of Europe, the Grand Monarch is gravely informed that M. De la Motte has bought of four individuals 104 quarts of brandy at four francs per quart and sold it at twenty francs, thus making a profit of four-fifths.

thereon.

In this same way petty complaints against the Jesuits are made the subject of grave dis

patches. Indeed, in this system of espionage, of centralization, of absolutism, lies the grand fundamental reason why Canada never prospered under French rule. There was no freedom, no self-government, and consequently no development of the real power of its people or the resources of the country. The English colonies were left to wholesome neglect, to selfgovernment, to freedom. As early as 1671, M. Talon, Intendant of Canada, informs the King that Boston is more republican than monarchical; and in 1679 another Canadian Intendant informs the French Minister in regard to the same city: "Their government is democratic, and it is a republic under the protection of England, faintly recognizing his Britannic Majesty." The fruits of these two systems, side by side, teach a lesson against centralized power in any form of government-civil, ecclesiastical, monarchical, or republican.

There was one cause of difficulty between the Jesuits and the local authorities that did much to bring upon them the wrath of the governing power, but which redounds greatly to their credit. They, at an early day, boldly, earnestly and persistently opposed and denounced the sale of brandy to the Indians. The pious Laval was made Bishop of Quebec, or, as was his title, of Petra, in 1659. As early as 1665 he had, in concert with the Jesuits, forbidden the sale of brandy to the Indians on pain of excommunication, because it led them into mortal sin. So effectual was this order that no one dare sell or give a glass of liquor to Huron or Algonquin. Complaint seems to have been make to the King; for the Minister of the Marine, in writing to M. de Talon, Governor of Canada, in 1665, disapproves of the order in a course of reasoning quite Jesuitical. He acknowledges the principle to be good, but contends that it is hurtful to trade, as it will drive the Indians to trade with the Dutch, and they will be taught heresy, a greater evil than drunkenness; and he bitterly complains that notwithstanding the force of this reasoning, the Bishop and the Jesuits still persist, "not reflecting," says he, "that prudence and even Christian charity requires us to shut our eyes to one evil to avoid a greater." For more than a quarter of a century the brandy war raged between the traders and the priests. Most of the secular officers were interested in Indian trade, and as now, nothing

paid so good a profit as brandy; consequently they took sides in favor of the traffic. Perhaps those who have so recently fought the battle of prohibition on the one side and the other in this State, were not aware that the same battle was fought upon our own soil nearly two hundred years ago. Mackinaw and Detroit were both battle-fields, and the arguments on both sides were perhaps as full and forcible as any that have been used by the recent combatants.

The holy Fathers were not content with the mere exercise of spiritual power. They called upon the strong arm of the law, and as early as 1681 they had obtained an ordinance from the King prohibiting the traffic. At a later period, 1694, there seems to have been a special order forbidding the transportation of brandy to Mackinaw. The worthy founder of Detroit, while yet in command at Mackinaw, made himself the champion of the unrestrained traffic. Some of his arguments are worthy of note. He says the principal food of the inhabitants is fish and smoked meat, and a drink of brandy after the repast is necessary to cook the bilious meats and the crudities they leave in the stomach. He appeals also to the patriotic ardor of the Frenchmen, and asks: "In what country or in what land, until now, have they taken from the French the right to use brandy? Are we not subjects of the same King as others?" He asks, too, with the same ardor that marks our recent debates: "What reason can be given why savages have not a right to drink brandy purchased with their own money?" and scouts at the reason urged by the Jesuits, that it would injure them. "The savage himself asks," says he, "why they do not leave him in his beggary, his liberty, bis idleness. He was born in it, and he wishes to die in it. He would not exchange his wigwam, and the mat on which he camps like a monkey, for a palace." He also uses the now familiar argument that if the savage can not get brandy of the French he will get it of the English, and therefore no good will be accomplished by prohibition, while trade will be injured.

On the other hand it would be difficult to find in modern temperance documents, more. graphic descriptions of the evils of intemperance, and stronger arguments against the traffic, than are found in the memorials of the Jesuit Fathers and the dispatches of the time. Thus, in a dispatch to the Minister of