River of Forgotten Days by Daniel Spurr

Author:Daniel Spurr
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466893498
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

La Salle Descends the Illinois on the Ice, January 1682, by George Catlin, painted in 1847–48. (PAUL MELLON COLLECTION, © 1997 BOARD OF TRUSTEES, NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON, D.C.)

“No, I didn’t.”

Adria: “C’mon, guy.”

Most of our river conversations ended like that.

* * *

By the time La Salle at last returned to the Mississippi for his historic run all the way down, it was December 1681, and this time he was ready for it. With him was the indefatigable Henri de Tonti, and the Recollet friar Zénobe Membré—in all, there were twenty-three Frenchmen in his party as well as about twenty-five Indians, some from New England, they having fled from the defeat in Rhode Island of the Mohegan chief, King Philip. The warriors hunted and the squaws cooked, strapping their babies to planks and hanging them in trees to free their own hands for work.7

The Illinois River was frozen and it was necessary to drag the canoes like sleds. When they came to the Mississippi, they found it also iced over and were forced to wait. They built fires on the bank and watched the eagles dive futilely to catch fish caught between layers of ice. Then, one morning, a rumbling awoke them, and they rose to see the ice crack, the fragments shift; soon thereafter the sun melted the ice and the river opened.

If La Salle’s spirits were lifted, as I supposed, he apparently remained unimpressed. Of the five firsthand accounts written about the descent,8 none made much fuss about the Mississippi. The historian Anka Muhlstein wrote: “It is as though the Saint Lawrence had dulled their capacity for surprise and enthusiasm toward any other river: the ‘Father of Waters’ drew not a single exclamation of astonishment from them.”9

It could not have helped that here the party’s one compass was accidentally broken, a misfortune that in the days ahead would spin an ever more intricate web of errors. And although La Salle had acquired a descriptive account of Soto’s discovery of a large southern river—called in various Indian tongues the Chucagoa, the Tapatu, and other names—it, too, served only to confound him. During the 141 years separating Soto and La Salle, things had changed, presumably so much so that what the latter saw did not jibe with the observations of the former.

Traveling in Indian canoes, the large party quickly moved downstream. Where the Missouri enters, at a less oblique angle than the smaller Illinois, the spring torrent carried with it chunks of earth, trees, and other flotsam. Tossed by the turbulent meeting of waters, several of the canoes were nearly swamped.

On the western prairies thousands of buffalo grazed. In some places the animals were drinking from the river, so thick that the canoes could not find passage between them. The Indians among the party hunted the buffalo. However, La Salle, afraid of injuries, forbade his men from engaging the animals that writer François René de Chateaubriand (for whom the large, sauce-covered steak was named) described as having “the mane of

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