valley of the "Missipi," which we are to enter in the next chapter.




CHAPTER III

THE PATHS OF THE GRAY FRIARS AND BLACK GOWNS


It was exactly a hundred years, according to some authorities, after
Jacques Cartier opened and passed through the door of the St. Lawrence
Valley that another son of France, Jean Nicolet, again the first of
Europeans so far as is now certainly known, looked over into the great
valley of the Mississippi from the north.

Champlain, dying beneath the Rock of Quebec, had touched two of the Great
Lakes twenty years before. He never knew probably that another of those
immense inland seas lay between, though, as his last map indicates, he had
some word several years before his death of a greater sea beyond, where
now two mighty lakes, the largest bodies of fresh water on the globe,
carry their sailless fleets and nourish the life of millions on their
shores.

From the coureurs de bois, "runners of the woods," whom he, tied by the
interests of his feeble colony to the Rock, had sent out, enviously no
doubt, upon journeys of exploration and arbitration among the Indians, and
from the Gray Friars and Black Gowns who, inflamed of his spirit, had gone
forth through the solitudes from Indian village to village, from suffering
to suffering, reports had come which he must have been frequently