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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the first protest against the St. Louis water supply; for that stream, they said, “is full as large as the River Colbert, into which it empties, troubling it so that from the mouth the water is hardly drinkable.” The Indians entertained him with the fiction that by going up the Missouri ten or twelve days he would come to a mountain, beyond which was the sea with many ships.

La Salle was the man who put the French into the Mississippi Valley, and thus gave them possession of the two finest regions in North America,—the whole watershed of the St. Lawrence, including the Great Lakes, and the whole watershed of the Mississippi. How many different craft have followed after his canoes,—a keel boat containing Aaron Burr and his misfortunes; a flat boat, with Abraham Lincoln stretching his long arms over the steering oar; the Belle of St. Louis racing the Belle of Memphis, cramming sugar and hams into the furnace, and, just as she pulled abreast of her rival, blowing up in most spectacular style; and Porter’s gunboats, driving past Vicksburg and exchanging broadsides with the batteries on the heights! Little did La Salle know that he was opening up a highway for a nation not yet born!

ENGLISH CLAIMS


GENERAL PEPPERELL AT LOUISBURG

General Pepperell was commander of the English forces which on June 16, 1745, captured the town of Louisburg.

Where were the English all this time? Did their Indian friends tell them nothing about great rivers full of crocodiles, and crook-backed, woolly oxen, and mountains of gold? After 1664 they held the whole coast from the St. Croix River to the Savannah River; but it took them a long time simply to reach the edge of the Mississippi Valley. Two adventurous men, Thomas Batts, and the German, John Lederer, wormed their way through the confused mountains of western Virginia, and Batts reached the New River about 1671,—“a pleasing but dreadful sight to see, mountains and hills piled one upon another.” They took possession of “all the territories thereunto belonging” for his Majesty Charles II. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania all had charters reaching west of the mountains; but they knew better than to try to pick up territory from under the lodge poles of the ferocious Iroquois. The English seemed to lack the discoverer’s spirit, which can be satisfied only, as the colored preacher puts it, “by unscrewing the inscrutable.” John Endicott thought he was as heroic as Marco Polo, when he went up the Merrimac River to Lake Winnepesaukee, and there cut his initials on a rock; and Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia felt very proud of himself when in 1716 he conducted a party of gentlemen on horseback across the mountains into the valley of the Shenandoah, which was still a long way from the Mississippi Basin.


DOOR OF OLD HOUSE, DEERFIELD

Showing the holes chopped in the door by the Indians, through which they shot Mrs. Weldon, a victim of the raid.

The French riveted their claim on the Mississippi by sending out a colony in 1699, which soon after founded the town of New Orleans, on the high bluff fourteen feet above the sea level of the nearby Lake Pontchartrain. They made many settlements; such as Detroit, and St. Joseph, and Green Bay, Vincennes, Kaskaskia, and Natchez. They set up trading posts among the Indians; they buried lead plates along the banks of the Ohio River, bearing the arms of the king,—they had a clear claim to the two enormous river valleys.

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