Worn by suffering, hardships and peril, and racked by the pestilential fever that still hovers about the river lowlands, De Soto paid the debt of nature, and his thrice decimated followers made their way back to France.  It seemed a strange, incredible story that they told, for such a mighty river, with its vast plain, was beyond conception.  Its source, they said, was in the north—­among the eternal snows—­farther than it had ever been given to man to penetrate.  Its waters, they thought, were poured into the Gulf of California, or perhaps into the great Virginia Sea.  Its flood, they said, was so great that if all the rivers of Europe were gathered into one channel, they would not be a tithe as large.  But the people who heard these wonderful accounts were unconcerned.  The French monarch knew naught but to debauch his heritance; the French courtier intrigued and plundered; the French peasant, dogged and sullen in his long suffering, dragged out his miserable existence.  The flood of waters rolled on, and a hundred and thirty years must come and go before the next white man should see the sheen of its rippling.

Let us cast a retrograde glance to the history of this period.  It was only fifty years before that Columbus had dropped anchor off the coral reef of Samana Cay, and thrilled the Old World by announcing the discovery of the New.  Elizabeth, the virgin Queen of England, was a proud, haughty girl just entering her teens, all unmindful of her eventful future.  Mary Queen of the Scots was a tiny infant in swaddling clothes.  The labors of Rafael Sanzio were still fresh in the memory of his surviving pupils.  Michael Angelo was in the zenith of his fame, bending his energies to the beautifying of the great cathedral.  Martin Luther was in the sere old age of his life, waiting for the command of the Master, which should bid him lay down his armor.  A hundred years were to elapse before Charles I. of England must pay with his life the price of his folly.

Joliet, a French trader, was a man possessed of far more brains than marked the average men of his times.  He had not only the indomitable courage which is essential to the successful explorer, but he had also the rare ability to manage men; and we find him in 1672 with a commission from the French king directing him to explore the valley which was to be a part of New France.  The lands which he visited must be his fee to the king; certain rights of trade he wisely secured to himself.  So, with Pere Marquette, a Jesuit priest, he undertook the mission, which we may doubt whether to call a journey of discovery or an errand of diplomacy.  Crossing the ocean, their route lay along the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes; through the Great Lakes to the country of the Illini; down the Illinois to the Mississippi, and down the Mississippi to its junction with the Arkansas.  Here they encamped near the site of Napoleon.  Everywhere along their route they had won the hearts of the savage Illini.