Part 5

"I will draw them off," Marquette determined, bringing out the papers on which he set down his notes; and while the men stuck their paddles in the water to hold the canoes against the current, he made his drawing.

One of the monsters seen by the explorers remained on those rocks until the middle of our own century. It was called by the Indians the Piasa. More than two centuries of beating winter storms had not effaced the brilliant picture when it was quarried away by a stupidly barbarous civilization. The town of Alton, in the state of Illinois, is a little south of that rock where the Piasa dragons were seen.

As the explorers moved ahead on glassy waters, they looked back, and the line of vision changing, they saw that the figures were cut into the cliff and painted in hollow relief.

They were still talking about the monsters when they heard the roar of a rapid ahead, and the limpid Mississippi turned southward on its course. It was as if they had never seen the great river until this instant. For a mighty flood, rushing through banks from the west, yellow with mud, noisy as a storm, eddying islands of branches, stumps, whole trees, took possession of the fair stream they had followed so long. It shot across the current of the Mississippi in entering so that the canoes danced like eggshells and were dangerously forced to the eastern bank. Afterwards they learned that this was the Pekitanoüi, or, as we now call it, the Missouri River, which flows into the Mississippi not far above the present city of St. Louis; and that by following it to its head waters and making a short portage across a prairie, a man might in time enter the Red or Vermilion Sea of California.

Having slipped out of the Missouri's reach, the explorers were next threatened by a whirlpool among rocks before they reached the mouth of Ouaboukigou, the Ohio River. They saw purple, red, and violet earths, which ran down in streams of color when wet, and a sand which stained their paddles like blood. Tall canes began to feather the shore, and mosquitoes tormented them as they pressed on through languors of heat. Jolliet and Marquette made awnings of sails which they had brought as a help to the paddles. They were floating down the current of the muddy, swollen river when they saw Indians with guns on the east shore. The voyageurs dropped their paddles and seized their own weapons. Marquette stood up and spoke to the Indians in Huron. They made no answer. He held up the white calumet. Then they began to beckon, and when the party drew to land, they made it clear that they had themselves been frightened until they saw the Blackrobe holding the calumet. A long-haired tribe, somewhat resembling the Iroquois, but calling themselves Tuscaroras; they were rovers, and had axes, hoes, knives, beads, and double glass bottles holding gunpowder, for which they had traded with white people eastward.

They fed the French with buffalo meat and white plums, and declared it was but a ten days' journey to the sea. In this they were mistaken, for it was more than a thousand miles to the Gulf of Mexico.

To each tribe as he passed, Marquette preached his faith by the belt of the prayer. For each he had a wampum girdle to hold while he talked, and to leave for a remembrance. His words without a witness would be forgotten.

Three hundred miles farther the explorers ventured, and had nearly reached the mouth of the Arkansas River, floating on a wide expanse of water between lofty woods, when they heard wild yelling on the west shore, and saw a crowd of savages pushing out huge wooden canoes to surround them. Some swam to seize the Frenchmen, and a war club was thrown over their heads. Marquette held up the peace-pipe, but the wild young braves in the water paid no attention to it. Arrows were ready to fly from all sides, and Marquette held the peace-pipe on high and continually prayed. At once old Indians restrained the young ones. In their turmoil they had not at first seen the calumet; but two chiefs came directly out to bring the strangers ashore.

Not one of the missionary's six languages was understood by these Indians. He at last found a man who spoke a little Illinois, and Jolliet and he were able to explain their errand. He preached by presents, and obtained a guide to the next nation.

On that part of the river where the French came to a halt, the Spanish explorer De Soto was said to have died two hundred years before. In this region the Indians had never seen snow, and their land yielded three crops a year. Their pots and plates were of baked earth, and they kept corn in huge gourds, or in baskets woven of cane fibers. They knew nothing of beaver skins; their furs were the hides of buffaloes. Watermelons grew abundantly in their fields. Though they had large wigwams of bark, they wore no clothing, and hung beads from their pierced noses and ears.

These Akamsea, or Arkansas Indians showed traits of the Aztecs under Spanish dominion; for what is now the state of Texas was then claimed by Spain. Marquette and Jolliet held a council. They were certain that the great river discharged itself into the Gulf of Mexico. If they ventured farther, they might fall into the hands of Spaniards, who would imprison them; or they might be killed by fiercer tribes than any yet encountered, and in either case their discoveries would be lost. So they decided to turn back.

All day the Arkansas feasted them with merciless savage hospitality, and it was not polite to refuse food or the attention of rocking. Two stout Indians would seize a voyageur between them and rock him back and forth for hours. If the motion nauseated him, that was his misfortune.

Pierre Porteret crept out behind one of the bark lodges looking very miserable in the fog of early morning. His companion on many a long journey, never far out of his shadow, sat down to compare experiences.

"Did they rock thee all night, Pierre?"

"They rocked me all night, Jacques. I can well endure what most men can, but this is carrying politeness too far."

"I was not so favored. They would have saved you if they had killed the rest of us. And they would have saved the good father, no doubt, since the chief came and danced the calumet before him."

"Were these red cradle-rockers intending to make an end of us in the night?"

"So the chief says; but he broke up the council, and will set us safely on our journey up river to-day."

"I am glad of that," said Pierre. "Father Marquette hath not the strength of the Sieur Jolliet for such rude wanderings. These southern mists, and torturing insects, and clammy heats, and the bad food have worked a great change in him."

"We have been gone but two months from the Mission of St. Ignace," said Jacques. "They have the bigness of years."

"And many more months that have the bigness of years will pass before we see it again."

They grew more certain of this, when, after toiling up the current through malarial nights and sweltering days, the explorers left the Mississippi and entered the river Illinois. There, above Peoria Lake, another Illinois town of seventy-four lodges was found, and these Kaskaskias so clung to the Blackrobe that he promised to come back and teach them. From the head waters of the Illinois a portage was made to Lake Michigan, and the French returned to the Bay of the Puans alongshore. They had traveled over twenty-five hundred miles, and accomplished the object of their journey.

Jolliet, with his canoe of voyageurs, his maps and papers, and the young Indian boy given him by the Illinois chief, went on to Montreal. His canoe was upset in the rapids of Lachine just above Montreal, and he lost two men, the Indian boy, his papers, and nearly everything except his life. But he was able to report to the governor all that he had seen and done.

Marquette lay ill, at the Bay of the Puans, of dysentery, brought on by hardship; and he was never well again. Being determined, however, to go back and preach to the tribe on the Illinois River, he waited all winter and all the next summer to regain his strength. He carefully wrote out and sent to Canada the story of his discoveries and labors. In autumn, with Pierre Porteret and the voyageur Jacques, he ventured again to the Illinois. Once he became so ill they were obliged to stop and build him a cabin in the wilderness, at the risk of being snowed in all winter. It was not until April that he reached what he called his Mission of the Immaculate Conception, on the Illinois River, through snow, and water and mud, hunger and misery. He preached until after Easter, when, his strength being exhausted, Pierre and Jacques undertook to carry him home to the Mission of St. Ignace. Marquette had been two years away from his palisaded station on the north shore, and nine years in the New World.

It was the 19th of May, and Pierre and Jacques were paddling their canoe along the east side of that great lake known now as Michigan. A creek parted the rugged coast, and dipping near its shallow mouth they looked anxiously at each other.

"What shall we do?" whispered Jacques.

"We must get on as fast as we can," answered Pierre.

They were gaunt and weather-beaten themselves from two years' tramping the wilderness. But their eyes dwelt most piteously on the dying man stretched in the bottom of the canoe. His thin fingers held a cross. His white face and bright hair rested on a pile of blankets. Pierre and Jacques felt that no lovelier, kinder being than this scarcely breathing missionary would ever float on the blue water under that blue sky.