appearance; but he says that his Indians made sacrifices to them as they
passed.] He confesses that at first they frightened him; and his
imagination and that of his credulous companions were so wrought upon by
these unhallowed efforts of Indian art, that they continued for a long
time to talk of them as they plied their paddles. They were thus engaged,
when they were suddenly aroused by a real danger. A torrent of yellow mud
rushed furiously athwart the calm blue current of the Mississippi; boiling
and surging, and sweeping in its course logs, branches, and uprooted
trees. They had reached the mouth of the Missouri, where that savage
river, descending from its mad career through a vast unknown of barbarism,
poured its turbid floods into the bosom of its gentler sister. Their light
canoes whirled on the miry vortex like dry leaves on an angry brook. "I
never," writes Marquette, "saw any thing more terrific;" but they escaped
with their fright, and held their way down the turbulent and swollen
current of the now united rivers. [Footnote: The Missouri is called
Pekitanoui by Marquette. It also bears, on early French maps, the names of
Riviere des Osages, and Riviere des Emissourites, or Oumessourits. On
Marquette's map, a tribe of this name is placed near its banks, just above
the Osages. Judging by the course of the Mississippi that it discharged
into the Gulf of Mexico, he conceived the hope of one day reaching the
South Sea by way of the Missouri.] They passed the lonely forest that
covered the site of the destined city of St. Louis, and, a few days later,
saw on their left the mouth of the stream to which the Iroquois had given
the well-merited name of Ohio, or, the Beautiful River. [Footnote: Called
on Marquette's map, Ouabouskiaou. On some of the earliest maps, it is
called Ouabache (Wabash).] Soon they began to see the marshy shores buried
in a dense growth of the cane, with its tall straight stems and feathery
light-green foliage. The sun glowed through the hazy air with a languid
stifling heat, and, by day and night, mosquitoes in myriads left them no
peace. They floated slowly down the current, crouched in the shade of the