two birch-bark canoes, they paddled up the lake to Green Bay, entered
Fox River, and, dragging the boats through its boiling rapids, came to a
village where lived the Miamis and the Kickapoos. These Indians tried to
dissuade them from going on; but Marquette was resolute, and on the 10th
of June, 1673, he led his followers over the swamps and marshes that
separated Fox River from a river which the Indian guides assured him
flowed into the Mississippi. This westward-flowing river he called the
Wisconsin, and there the guides left him, as he says, "alone, amid that
unknown country, in the hands of God."

The little band shoved their canoes boldly out upon the river, and for
seven days floated slowly downward into the unknown. At last, on the
17th of June, they paddled out on the bosom of the Mississippi, and,
turning their canoes to the south, followed the bends and twists of the
river, past the mouth of the Missouri, past the Ohio, to a point not far
from the mouth of the Arkansas. There the voyage ended, and the party
went slowly back to the Lakes.[1]

[Footnote 1: Read Parkman's _La Salle and the Discovery of the Great
West_.]

%56. La Salle finishes the Work of Marquette and Joliet.%--The
discovery of Marquette and Joliet was the greatest of the age. Yet five
years went by before Robert de la Salle (lah sahl') set forth with
authority from the French King "to labor at the discovery of the western
part of New France," and began the attempt to follow the river to the
sea. In 1678 La Salle and his companions left Canada, and made their way
to the shore of Lake Erie, where during the winter they built and
launched the _Griffin_, the first ship that ever floated on those
waters. In this they sailed to the mouth of Green Bay, and from there