long before our days, our days’ notions of the importance of great commercial routes; whose purpose was to open one to China across this continent at the very spot where your northern lines of railways have opened theirs; who called his first house on American soil La China in order that he might never forget his initial purpose.  He died in the quest, but not before he had explored the Mississippi down to its mouth; not before he had ascertained that its source was to the West, and that the river therefore could be used as a guiding thread toward the Pacific; not before he had made the first French settlement in this, your country, and given it a name, which has not been replaced by another, and is its present name of Louisiana.

Long is the roll and great were the hardships.  To the same region, with the same object of discovering and improving, came that typical cadet De Gascogne, the Chevalier Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, who, on the 21st of July, 1701, unfurled the French flag at a certain spot where he began the building of a town, now the town of Detroit.  He became afterwards governor of Louisiana.  Then such men came as Du Tissnet, as the brothers Le Moine de Iberville and Le Moine de Bienville, this last the founder of New Orleans; as Father de Charlevoix, who gave the best account we have of the country, and spoke most wisely about its future; as La Clede, worthier than anyone to be remembered at this day and this place, as he was the founder of your town.

The exploration of the coasts had been comparatively easy, and thousands had attempted it.  Settlers from France were the first to try their chance inland; they traveled across a huge continent more unknown then to the civilized world than was in our time the Africa of Livingstone and Stanley.  They did it in a cheerful, optimistic spirit that nothing daunted but death.  Living as they did in truly “howling wildernesses,” there remained yet with them something of the mother country; and that appeared not only in their speech and manners, but in their very attitudes.  Charlevoix meets figures of dead men fabricated by Indians.  He was glad to find that they were represented with falling arms, from which he concluded that the authors of the trophies had massacred some of their own kin.  When Indians killed French people, the figures represented men with their fist on their hip, Versailles fashion.

How could it be otherwise when they lived, some of them, on a settlement owned by a gentleman called d’Artagnan and managed, as was appropriate, by two musketeers.  One almost expects the names of those two to have been Porthos and Aramis; but they were d’Artiguidres and De Benac.

And these men recalled their country in more important things than names and attitudes.  Cadillac had scarcely given a name to the spot where he meant to create a town than he sent for his wife and younger son.  It was to be a town,