N. D'Anvers

“ First California, and then Arizona and New Mexico, became the property of the United States, while the intervening districts between the first state on the Pacific seaboard to become the property of the American republic and the Mississippi were gradually filled up by an ever-increasing tide of emigration from the East and from the South, from the North and from the West. Step by step, little by little, the red men receded before the march of the whites, making every now and then a deeply pathetic, but ever futile attempt to stem the advance of their insidious destroyers. ”

“ We are few, and you are many, and may kill us all; but there will be much crying in your villages, for many of your young men will stay behind, and forget to return with your warriors from the mountains. Do you think that our great chief will let his soldiers die, and forget to cover their graves? Before the snows melt again, his warriors will sweep away your villages, as the fire does the prairie in the autumn. See! I have pulled down my white houses, and my people are ready; when the sun is ten paces higher, we shall be on the march. ”

“ On Christmas Day, 1620, after the site for the erection of the first house of the new settlement had been chosen at a spot called by the Indians Patuxet, and christened Plymouth by the new-comers, the main body of the emigrants went on shore. Many are the traditions which have gathered round the rock—of which a portion is still shown to visitors—on which these founders of a great nation first set foot, and in all of them the names of the governor, Carver, and the military captain, Standish, stand out as those of men who were equal to every emergency. ”

“ BEFORE closing our record of the advance of the white man westwards, we must glance once more at British America, which we left on the eve of the great political crisis at the end of the last century—a crisis which, after long years of absorbing struggles, resulted in the consolidation into a single colony of Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, British Columbia, and the vast territories long held by the Hudson’s Bay and other North-west companies. ”

“ From the summit of Fremont’s Peak the explorers could see on the one side the innumerable lakes and streams among which sprang the Colorado of the Gulf of California, while on the other lay the romantic Wind River Valley, whence flows the Yellowstone branch of the Missouri; while far away on the north rose the snow-crowned heads of the Trois Tetons, the first homes of the Missouri and Columbia, with the less lofty peaks at the southern extremity of the range which witnessed the birth of the Nebraska. ”

“ Fierce indeed was the struggle in which they were now involved, and, overwhelmed by superior numbers, the colonists seemed likely to be exterminated, when the tide was turned by the courage of Freydis, a daughter of Eric the Red, who, imbued with the brave spirit of her father, suddenly faced the savages, and brandishing a sword which she had taken from a dead warrior of her own race, she invited the enemy to come and slay her if they would, even tearing open her dress to make clear her meaning. ”

“ Four only of the original party survived to reach the western coast, and these four, of whom Cabeca de Vaca—who seems to have borne a charmed life—was one, were held in captivity by the Indians long years before they were able to effect their escape. Great indeed was the surprise of the colonists on the shores of the Gulf of California, when the little party of bronzed and half-naked wanderers, speaking their own tongue, appeared at the outposts of the little mining settlement; and when their identity with the long-lost explorers was proved, enthusiasm knew no bounds. ”

“ While La Salle was vainly struggling to accomplish the end for which he had sailed to Louisiana, the French were not idle in the North. In the rich peltries of the far West the fur-traders found a source of wealth rivaling even the mines of the South, and a class of men—unique alike in their manners and their experiences—sprang up, as it were, in the heart of the wilderness, to whom the name of coureurs des bois was given. ”

“ For the first time the eyes of a European rested upon that portion of the universal sea surrounding the North Pole which washes the northern coast of America; for the first time the white man realized the existence of yet another ocean—an ocean which must henceforth replace the fabulous unbroken masses of land figuring on all maps between the most northerly limit reached by explorers and the North Pole. ”

“ Grand Manan was within the limits of the New World already ceded to the English, and before the first crops sown by the French had had time to germinate, Captain Argall—the same who had carried off Pocahontas—sailing up the coast on one of his exploring expeditions from Virginia, heard of the infant settlement, and bore down upon it, bent on its destruction. The French, dreaming of no evil, were, some on land, others, to the number of ten, on board their vessel, at anchor off Bar Harbor. ”

“ Emigration has more than kept pace with the advance of the Canadian Pacific Railway; the Red River settlers, no longer isolated from their kind, are at last enjoying the prosperity so long withheld; the number of settlers has increased rapidly since the opening of two outlets to the ocean for their produce; new settlements in the West are springing up as if by magic; a line of telegraph is completed between the ports on the banks of the Saskatchewan and the chief towns of Canada ”

“ The united streams now took the name of the Snake, and turned out, on examination, to be identical with the Lewis fork of the Columbia—a fact which greatly cheered the travelers, though their troubles were by no means yet at an end. The Snake was encumbered with rocks, its bed was seldom level, and again and again the canoes were nearly upset in the rapids. Not a human creature was to be seen on the banks; and as prairie succeeded prairie, and one wilderness of deserted mountains after another was passed, the spirits of the adventurers flagged. ”

“ A march of a couple of days brought the pioneers to a lofty ridge, from which they had their first view of the Rocky Mountains—that grand continuation of the Cordilleras of Mexico, which forms a kind of backbone to North America, and is the common ancestral home of the rivers of the far West, and of many of those whose last resting-places are in the extreme North or the Gulf of Mexico. ”

“ In a little open boat the two sped down the river, arriving at the capital of the colony in time to avert much bloodshed. Messages were sent to the outlying settlements; and the Indians, finding themselves outwitted, would have retired to their woods, had not the whites cut off their retreat, and in their turn slain without mercy all who fell into their hands. Throughout the length and breadth of the land desolation now replaced the former plenty, and it soon became evident to the natives that in their wild rising they had sounded their own death-knell. ”

“ The pioneers of the new order of things often surprised some little group of dusky half-caste children, with eager eyes and vivacious ways of their French fathers contrasting strangely with the shrinking timidity inherited from their savage mothers. Now and then, too, bloody struggles took place between the hunters of the rival nations; and the natives, delighted to see the white men devouring each other, began those treacherous assaults, in which they have ever proved themselves adepts, which culminated in the massacres of Detroit and Michilimackinac. ”

“ Now, as we know, the French, who claimed all lands from Canada to the Pacific seaboard on the west, and to the Arctic circle on the north, had already penetrated to the shores of Hudson’s Bay, and up the Saskatchewan to the Rocky Mountains. From the first, therefore, the new corporation, known as the Hudson’s Bay Company, found itself face to face with a formidable rival, and, to the great disappointment of its founders, the men who were sent out to develop the resources of the newly-obtained territories showed themselves altogether unworthy of the trust reposed in them. ”

“ At Omaha, the fame of the great chief Blackbird, who has figured in so many romances, still lived, and Hunt and his party were among the last white men to look upon the sacred mound beneath which his body reposes, with its ghastly trophies of scalps still displayed on its summit, suspended upon the staff of the hero’s banner. The mound itself is still pointed out to the modern traveler, but the scalps, with so many other relics of the olden time, are gone.
A little below the Great Bend of the Missouri, the first encounter took place with the Indians. ”

“ ALTHOUGH the discovery of America used to be dated from the voyage of Columbus to the West Indies in 1492, there can be little doubt that this great hero was by no means the first explorer of our era to visit the New World. The existence of land to the west of the Pillars of Hercules was even known to the ancients. Frequent mention is made by Greek and Roman authors of islands on the West, especially of the fair Atlantis, concerning which Plato gives many details, declaring it to have been of vast extent and great beauty, but to have been swallowed up by the sea in pre-historic times. ”

“ The camp was pitched in the eastern side, and the fires had scarcely been lighted, when crowds of almost naked Indians rushed in, bringing with them long nets and bows greatly resembling those in use on the Sacramento River, which, as Fremont knew, drains the great central valley of California. Here was an incidental proof of the approaching end of the long and terrible journey, for in nothing are local influences in America more distinctly reflected than in the arms and utensils of the natives. ”

“ Down the glorious river, between the modern States of Iowa and Illinois, the two little canoes now floated, till, about sixty leagues below the mouth of the Wisconsin, our heroes noticed the trail of men on the western bank of the Mississippi. Determined at once to learn something of the people of the newly-discovered districts, Marquette and Joliet hastened to land, and, crossing one of the beautiful prairies of Iowa, they soon came to a group of three villages, one on the bank of a river, and two on a hill a little distance off. ”

“ A wild and narrow pass, through which ran an Indian trail, with mountains on either side cased in snow and ice, led up to a lofty height, looking down from which, several natives were seen skimming and circling about on snow-shoes.
The shouts of the whites, who were eager to obtain guides, only frightened the natives, who scudded rapidly away; but the next day a number of Indians were surprised in a little valley, and the travelers succeeded in reassuring them by signs of friendship. ”

“ Meantime, as we have seen, the United States were being intersected by railways, and their ocean boundaries were connected by iron bands. California—youngest state of the Union, and a few short years before but an unknown desert—had become the golden link between the East and the West. Yet the owners of a territory as vast, and perhaps as full of great possibilities as the mighty republic itself, still remained in ignorance of the true character of their possessions. ”

“ The completion of the Southern Pacific railroad, and the opening of the many supplementary transit lines of the Union, have at last united in indissoluble bonds the States of the East and of the West. Fresh capital and fresh enterprise are ever flowing, like mighty arteries, throughout the once deserted wastes between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains ”

“ But the craft of the Indian had once more supplied his want of strength to cope with the white man. So soon as the Spaniards were asleep in the miserable wigwams they had seized, the savages gathered round them with stealthy tread, and set fire to their temporary resting-places. Many who escaped the flames fell victims to the poisoned arrows let fly with unerring aim from ambushes on every side, and when the morning broke, the few survivors, including Narvaez himself, determined to return to the sea by the shortest route they could find. ”

“ Lake Nipissing was on this occasion almost covered with the canoes of the warriors, moving solemnly toward that point of the shore where the souls of the departed were to be fêted. Under a long, rough shed, in coffins of bark, wrapped in costly furs, lay the decaying bones of those who had gone to the other world; and over them a song, half of triumph, half of regret, was sung by the warriors, the women accompanying them with a wailing cry, full of unutterable melancholy. ”

“ The villagers were Illinois, which is the Indian word for “men;” and men they quickly proved themselves to be. Conducted to the wigwam of an aged chief, the French explorers were plied with eager questions; and when they told of the breaking of the power of the Iroquois by the “great Captain of the French,” the assembled “men” greeted the announcement with shouts of joy. Then followed the usual instruction in the broad truths of Christianity, and again the “men” rejoiced, doubtless connecting in their simple untutored minds the two items of good news. ”

“ Only in the extreme North have we any romance in American travel which can at all compare with that so inseparably connected with the winning of each of the secrets of that sister continent so aptly named the Dark. ”