[Illustration: LA SALLE'S COLONY on the Illinois FROM THE MAP OF
FRANQUELIN, 1684.]




INTRODUCTION.


The Spaniards discovered the Mississippi. De Soto was buried beneath its
waters; and it was down its muddy current that his followers fled from the
Eldorado of their dreams, transformed to a dismal wilderness of misery and
death. The discovery was never used, and was well-nigh forgotten. On early
Spanish maps, the Mississippi is often indistinguishable from other
affluents of the Gulf. A century passed after De Soto's journeyings in the
South, before a French explorer reached a northern tributary of the great
river.

This was Jean Nicollet, interpreter at Three Rivers on the St. Lawrence.
He had been some twenty years in Canada, had lived among the savage
Algonquins of Allumette Island, and spent eight or nine years among the
Nipissings, on the lake which bears their name. Here he became an Indian
in all his habits, but remained, nevertheless, a zealous Catholic, and
returned to civilization at last because he could not live without the
sacraments. Strange stories were current among the Nipissings of a people
without hair and without beards, who came from the West to trade with a
tribe beyond the Great Lakes. Who could doubt that these strangers were
Chinese or Japanese? Such tales may well have excited Nicollet's