Many a river lives embalmed in history and in historic verse.  The Euphrates, the Nile, the Jordan, the Tiber, and the Rhine typify the course of empires and dynasties.  Countries have been described per flumina, but these streams possess renown rather from some city that frowned on their currents, or some battle fought and won on their banks.  The great River of our West, from its immense length and the still increasing importance of its valley, possesses a history of its own.  Its discovery by the Spanish adventurers, a Cabeza de Vaca, a De Soto, a Tristan, who reached, crossed, or followed it, is its period of early romance, brilliant, brief, and tragic.  Its exploration by Marquette and La Salle follows,—­work of patient endurance and investigation, still tinged with that light of heroism that hovers around all who struggle with difficulty and adversity to attain a great and useful end.  Then come the early voyages depicting the successive stages of its banks from a wilderness to civilization.

The death of La Salle in Texas in his attempt to reach Illinois closes the chapter of exploration.  Iberville opens a new period by his voyage to the mouth of the Mississippi, which crowning the previous efforts, gave the valley of the great river to civilization, Christianity, and progress.  The river had become an object of rivalry.  English, French, and Spanish at the same moment sought to secure its mouth, but fortune favored the bold Canadian, and the white flag reared by La Salle was planted anew.

...  At the moment when these narratives take us to the valley of the Mississippi, that immense territory presented a strange contrast to its present condition.  From its head waters amid the lakes of Minnesota to its mouth; from its western springs in the heart of the Rocky mountains to its eastern cradle in the Alleghenies, all was yet in its primeval state.  The Europeans had but one spot, Tonty’s little fort; no white men roamed it but the trader or the missionary.  With a sparse and scattered Indian population, the country teeming with buffalo, deer, and game, was a scene of plenty.  The Indian has vanished from its banks with the game that he pursued.  The valley numbers as many states now as it did white men then; a busy, enterprising, adventurous, population, numbering its millions, has swept away the unprogressive and unassimilating red man.  The languages of the Illinois, the Quapaw, the Tonica, the Natchez, the Ouma, are heard no more by the banks of the great water; no calumet now throws round the traveller its charmed power; the white banner of France floated long to the breeze, but with the flag of England and the standard of Spain all disappeared we may say within a century.  For fifty years one single flag met the eye, and appealed to the heart of the inhabitants of the shores of the Mississippi.[45] Two now divide it:  let us hope that the altered flag may soon resume its original form, and meet the heart’s warm response at the month as at the source of the Mississippi.