قراءة كتاب The Mentor: The Story of America in Pictures, Vol. 1, No. 35, Serial No. 35 The Contest for North America

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The Mentor: The Story of America in Pictures, Vol. 1, No. 35, Serial No. 35
The Contest for North America

The Mentor: The Story of America in Pictures, Vol. 1, No. 35, Serial No. 35 The Contest for North America

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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all in the last act! What a destiny for the earliest explorers of our country!

One reason why the French secured early control of the interior was that they had an astonishing gift of living on the country. When Stanley crosses the Dark Continent, or Amundsen penetrates the White Continent, he carries great quantities of stores with him; but Champlain, and Marquette, and La Salle went light. The Frenchmen paddled their canoes along with their Indian friends, lived on game and Indian corn, found much to engage and interest them, and were always ready for a joyous fight. Frenchmen know how to draw the pleasures of life out of unpromising surroundings.

FOUNDING OF QUEBEC

The French made their first permanent settlement at Quebec in 1608; but the English had then been in Jamestown a year. From the first the continent was too small to hold two such boisterous, expanding, and conflict-loving people. Captain Argall in 1613 opened the ball by capturing the little Jesuit settlement at Flying Mountain on Mount Desert. From that time, for just a hundred and fifty years, the two nations were sparring with each other.


Copyright, 1897, by Little, Brown & Co. Reproduced by permission.

LA SALLE PRESENTING A PETITION TO KING LOUIS XIV

For many years this warfare was hedged in, because mountains, woods, and savages filled up a broad belt of territory between the English coast settlements and the St. Lawrence. But in war, as in the chivalric game of football, when you cannot break through the center, you play round the ends. Hence in every one of the six regular wars, besides various local squabbles, there was always fighting between French and English in Nova Scotia, or the Islands of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, or along that river. In 1613 the English captured Port Royal on the Bay of Fundy, and again in 1690 and 1710,—it became almost a habit,—in 1670 they broke into Hudson Bay; in 1745 and 1758 they mastered Louisburg; and in 1759 took Quebec.

LA SALLE

The most gallant figure in this century and a half is the chevalier Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, who had all the pluck and endurance of his Norman ancestors. He was educated by the Jesuits; but preferred the life of a seignior on the frontier of Canada. There he heard tales of a river starting somewhere near the Great Lakes and following so long a course that he guessed it must be the Colorado. From that time he became a still hunter for the Mississippi River. He built the Griffin, the first vessel ever seen on Lake Erie. Apparently he found the Ohio, and decided that that was not the advertised stream; and before he could get to the Mississippi it had been discovered by the priest Marquette and the Indian trader Joliet, while Father Hennepin went up the great stream to the falls.


NIAGARA FALLS

As pictured by Father Louis Hennepin, probably the first white man to see this wonderful waterfall. From a plate made from the original Utrecht edition of 1697.

La Salle had larger plans than to see new countries and float on strange rivers: he wanted to occupy that region for his sovereign and friend, Louis XIV, Le Grand Monarque. Early in 1682 he reached what the recorder of that expedition calls “the divine river, called by the Indians Checagou.” With him was that picturesque figure Tonti, “the man with the iron hand”—and his artificial member was no tougher and more enduring than his iron heart.

February 6, 1682, the expedition reached what they called “the River Colbert,” and six leagues lower they passed the mouth of the Missouri. There they registered

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