Explorers of the Mississippi (Search Book 8), page 1
EXPLORERS OF THE MISSISSIPPI
Tim Severin
© Timothy Severin 1967
Timothy Severin has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1967 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
This edition published in 2018 by Lume Books.
For Dobby
Table of Contents
Preface
Father of Waters
Conquistador from Badajoz
The “Rio Grande”
The Agent and the Priest
The Visionary
The Fatal River
Iron Hand
The Mendacious Friar
Captain from Connecticut
Enter the Army
The Red Silk Umbrella
The Silly Season
Selected Bibliography
Preface
The idea of writing a book about the explorers of the Mississippi occurred to me while I was spending twenty-one months in the United States on an International Fellowship from the Commonwealth Fund. The Mississippi had played no part in the original plans for my stay in North America, but as a student of the history of exploration and travel I was surprised to learn that no one had attempted a survey of the exploration of the “Father of Waters” from the point of view of the explorers themselves. There is, of course, a vast amount of literature about the Mississippi but most of it concerns either the Civil War days or the steamboat era. To a great extent the glamour of the paddle-wheels and King Cotton has swamped the story of the pioneers. This, it seemed to me, was a pity; for while such figures as De Soto and La Salle are well known, the exploits of the lesser men—Hennepin, Carver, Beltrami, and others—also deserve mention. In the following pages I have tried to tell their stories, concentrating as much as possible on the personalities themselves.
In at attempt to appreciate some of the geographical conditions which these explorers encountered, I undertook a boat trip during the summer of 1965 from one end of the river to the other. Starting by canoe from the source in northern Minnesota and then continuing by launch downstream from St. Paul, I managed to see the length of the Mississippi. The following winter I returned to Minneapolis where a wealth of research material was made available to me at the James Ford Bell Collection. There and at Harvard this book was written. It would not have been possible but for the assistance of many people, and my special thanks are due to Jack Parker, Carol Urness, and their staff at the Bell Collection; to the Ryberg family in Minneapolis; to Martha Bray; to the staff of Widener Library, Harvard University; and to a host of helpers ranging from canoe enthusiasts to barge masters along the Mississippi. Above all I should like to thank the staff of the International Fellowship Division, Commonwealth Fund, in New York; their help and the generosity of the Fund made my project a reality.
Timothy Severin
Harvard, June 1966.
1
Father of Waters
The ultimate source of the Mississippi is a small y-shaped lake in upper Minnesota about 175 miles from the Canadian border. The lake has a single outlet—a small stream which tumbles from one arm of the y as a puny riffle swirling between a chain of well-worn boulders. This is a favorite spot for tourists and many of the visitors like to use the boulders at steppingstones so that they can claim to have walked across the mighty Mississippi without getting their feet wet. But few of the tourists are curious enough to trace the stream any farther, for almost immediately it plunges into a maze of willow thickets and is lost from view.
Yet the Mississippi is worth following, even for those first few miles. It must be one of the very few major rivers in the world which develops meander loops within walking distance of its source. Whereas most infant rivers tumble along with great enthusiasm in the early stages, the Mississippi assumes its sedate character at once. Hidden among the pine and birch forests of the north it wriggles like a water snake, throwing its coils in a series of contortions which are miniature copies of its famous downstream oxbows. It is still narrow enough for beavers to build untidy dams of sticks and branches from one bank to the other, but already the Mississippi has settled down to a sober pace, curling interminably through little rocky basins which are cradled between low hills. This is wild country; there are massive fish eagles wheeling in the sky, an occasional moose, clumsy porcupines and white tailed deer, acres of whispering reeds, and the eerie cry of the loon piercing the early morning mist as if some hobgoblin is loose on the river.
It is also Indian country. Dotted along the upper river are tracts of land reserved exclusively for various bands of the Ojibway or Chippewa. They are the last remnants of a tribe which was powerful on the river before the white man. Then, more than three hundred years ago, the Mississippi was an Indian river. Spreading in a vast belt from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico was a multitude of tribes—Fox, Potawatomie, Kickapoo, Iowa, Illinois, Winnebago, Miami, Mascouten, Chickasaw, Otoe, Quapaw, and others. These Indians were in a constant state of turmoil, fighting one another, migrating from one area to the next, moving up and down the river. Even the Sioux, now associated with the Great Plains, were once a river tribe and paddled fleets of war canoes on the upper Mississippi. These aborigines used a variety of names to describe the river that supplied them with food and acted as a great highway from one end of the continent to the other. They called it Messipi, Namosisipu, Nilco, Mico, Culatta, Okachitto, Olsimochitto, Sassagoula, Malabanchia; but it was the Algonkian name—Mississippi—which finally won out. French traders heard it from the Chippewa and the other northern tribes and carried it downstream with them, until this word, variously translated as the “Big Water” or “Father of Waters,” became the accepted name from Montreal to Louisiana.
The early explorers found that many of the river tribes were relatively civilized. Far from being totally savage, they exhibited a high degree of social organization and had a sophisticated code of conduct. For example, they recognized the special protection afforded to any stranger who carried the calumet, or pipe of peace. Furthermore the tribes were seldom hostile. They usually regarded the white men as curiosities rather than enemies, and greeted the explorers with kindness. One of the earlier travel accounts by a European mentions the famous “wampum belt formula,” a speech customarily delivered at a council to welcome an ambassador from a distant tribe. It ran: “Brothers, with this belt I open your ears that you may hear. I remove grief and sorrow from your hearts. I draw from your feet the thorns that have pierced them on your journey hither. I sweep the seats about the council fire that you may sit at ease. I wash your heads and bodies that you may be refreshed. I condole with you on the loss of your friends who have died. I wipe out any blood that may have been spilt between us.”
This peaceable attitude on the part of the Indians, coupled with the absence of difficult cataracts or waterfalls, made the Mississippi an easy river to travel and explore by boat. Yet despite this, there is a gap of three centuries between the date when white men first saw the river and the time of the final discovery of the source in the little Minnesota lake. Of the several reasons for this lag, some are geographical but the important ones concern the explorers themselves and the policies they represented.
Among the geographical obstacles the first was the nature and position of the river’s mouth. The Mississippi delta is awkward to find from the sea and dangerous to navigate. As a result the very existence of the “Father of Waters” was still a mystery to European mapmakers long after Spanish sailors had brought back a reasonably accurate description of the Gulf coast of North America. Only when the Spaniards began to probe inland did they discover the largest river in the continent, a river so big that when the Missouri and Ohio are included, it drains one-eighth of all North America. Indeed, it was only by chance that the main river was recognized as rising in upper Minnesota. If the white men had come overland from the Pacific rather than the Atlantic, they would have struck the headwaters of the Missouri in the Rocky Mountains, and this branch, rather than the shorter northern stream, would have been declared to be the main river. By a quirk of history the Spaniards withdrew and left the task of exploration to the French who were obliged to approach from their colonies on the St. Lawrence. This had two results: first, they believed that the nearest branch they encountered, the northern stream, was the main river; and second, their explorers were exposed to the geographical obstacle of greatest significance—the climate. Time and again the Europeans were caught off guard by the rigors of a continental American winter, when temperatures of thirty degrees below zero are not uncommon, the land is covered with deep snow, and the river icebound. The harshness of the winters was made all the more stunning by the remoteness of the Mississippi. The early explorers had to spend at least one summer traveling by foot and canoe to get within striking distance of the river, and even after the French-Canadian settlers had established outposts on the Great Lakes it was necessary for their “voyageurs” to winter on the shores of Lake Superior before crossing the watershed that separated them from the Father of Waters. The long, hard winters limited traveling time, increased costs, and deterred all but the brave and ignorant from winter journeys.
But the most important reasons for the delay in exploring the Mississippi were political. The river was controlled at various periods by the Spanish, French, British, and Americans. Each nation was usually more concerned with protecting its
This obsession with the financial rewards of exploring the river is another peculiarity of the Mississippi’s history. Unlike the Nile or Niger, the exploration of the Father of Waters was not carried out under the aegis of geographical societies or learned committees, but was achieved for the greater part by private persons who anticipated some sort of gain for themselves—gold, furs, or glory. In consequence, the river’s exploration took place in a series of fits and starts, depending upon the activities of these opportunists. Otherwise the river was little used, because, in the words of Mark Twain, “nobody happened to want such a river; nobody needed it, nobody was curious about it, so … the Mississippi remained out of the market and undisturbed. When De Soto found it, he was not hunting for a river, and had no present occasion for one; consequently he did not value it or even take any particular notice of it.” Of course this was far from the whole story, though there is a grain of truth in the humorist’s version; there were many men on both sides of the Atlantic who dreamed about using the river’s potential. From the very first days of discovery they envisaged a great heartland civilization served by ocean-going ships plying deep into the continent; the Mississippi would be an artery of commerce and perhaps might provide a water route to the Indies. These were far-reaching plans but they were based on conjecture. No one knew the exact course of the river and few of the dreamers were prepared to back their ideas with money or materiel. Once again the exploration was left to those individuals who were willing to take risks because they saw immediate profits. These were the men who paddled along the river, encountered the tribes living on its banks, made treaties with their chieftains, and shared such native delicacies as fish fried in bear’s oil and flavored with crushed blueberries.
Many of these early travelers never recorded their adventures. It is more than possible, for instance, that the first white men to reach the Mississippi from the northeast were not Joliet and Marquette, but a gang of illiterate voyageurs ranging beyond the outer limit of the French western frontier. There were many such wanderers who lived like gypsies, sharing the life of the Indian tribes. They did not bother to report their journeys to the authorities—many of their trips were illegal in the eyes of the colonial government—and it is unavoidable that the following chapters recount only the exploits of those travelers whose stories were written down by themselves or their contemporaries. Even so, some of their tales can be annoyingly scanty. However, one thing is certain: after the withdrawal of the Spanish, the exploration of the Mississippi, known or unknown, depended upon a vital tool—the lightweight Indian canoe.
The Spaniards never learned to use the birchbark canoe of the northland because their expeditions were limited to the lower river so they were familiar only with the dugout canoe of the southern tribes. These dugouts were impressive vessels; the largest, made from a single giant cottonwood trunk, had a three-foot beam and could carry more than fifty warriors, but for exploration purposes they did not rival the lighter bark canoe of the woodland tribes. The French were the first to discover the incredible versatility of the northern boat and use it to full advantage. Once they had adopted the native method of river travel, the entire Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio drainage system lay open to them and no account of the Mississippi explorers can ignore the importance of their vessels.
The bark canoe of the North American Indians offered the explorer unique advantages over plank-built European boats. The Indian vessel was a highly specialized design intended for use on the rivers and lakes of the interior. As such, it was light enough to be handled in the water by a single paddler who could carry it, if necessary, over forest portage trails. The canoe was also sufficiently maneuverable to steer through dangerous rapids, and at the same time the larger versions held up to a ton of cargo without drawing more than ten inches of water. As an added feature, certain versions of the bark canoe were so constructed that the traveler could beach his vessel at night, turn it upside down on trestles, and have a ready-made roof over his head.
Before the arrival of the white man the birch bark canoe was restricted to the upper Mississippi for the very good reason that the essential material for the hull was the outer bark of the paper birch (Betula papyrifera). This tree, its chalky white trunk marked with distinctive black blotches, was found only north of a line extending from Long Island to Washington State. Near the Mississippi it grew no farther south than Wisconsin, and though such barks as spruce, chestnut, hickory, and basswood could be used for making canoes in an emergency, only the paper birch developed large sheets of bark tough enough to withstand prolonged wear. In particular the upper trunk provided a canoe cover that did not flake or decay quickly. The Indians peeled the birch trees in late fall or early spring when the rising sap made their task easier and they could select the finest pieces, about three-sixteenths of an inch thick, to roll up in bundles and carry back to their villages. Freshly cut, the sheets of bark gave off an aromatic odor and were flexible enough to be wrapped over the canoe’s framework of white cedarwood lathes which had been bent to shape in hot water. This frame was lashed together with rawhide thongs and the bark cover “sewn” into place with the pencil-thin roots of the black spruce (Picea mariana). The bark then dried to a cinnamon brown, retaining the desired shape. Paddles, ribs, thwarts, and headboards were cut out of cedar or spruce and the hull of the canoe was calked with spruce gum, the resin of black or white spruce which had been boiled or chewed until soft enough to smear over the stitching holes and other cracks. The end product was a graceful, speedy craft which could be repaired with local materials en route and was ideal for hunters, traders, and explorers. The white newcomers proved the excellence of the native vessel by adopting it immediately, only adding a sail, whenever possible, and using steel rather than stone tools in its construction. Otherwise the shape and style of the canoe remained unchanged and it was the vessel which the river travelers chose to paddle, sail, portage, and pole from one end of the Mississippi to the other.
The efforts of these early white pioneers can be traced through the development of contemporary maps. The cartographers, nearly all of them working as royal appointees several thousand miles away in Europe, were confused by the reports that came back to them from North America. At first they were thrown off stride by the magnitude of the river—the Mississippi discharges eight times as much water as the Rhine—and were reluctant to credit the existence of such a gargantuan stream. But then, as more knowledge filtered back, they overcompensated in the opposite direction; an enormous waterway appeared on their maps, spreading its interconnecting channels from Florida to the Pacific. Along its banks were depicted swarms of strange beasts, including camels, ostriches, and even a giraffe. Compounding the confusion, the white explorers had almost as many names for the river as their Indian predecessors. The Mississippi was marked on Spanish maps as the “Rio Grande” or the River of the Holy Ghost; on French missionary maps it was the River of the Immaculate Conception; and elsewhere it was called the river “Buade ou Frontenac,” the “Colbert,” the “St. Louis,” and the River of Louisiana. Not until 1684 could the eminent French mapmaker, Jean Baptiste Franquelin, unravel this confusion and draw the general outline of the Mississippi dominating the central valley. Even then he misplaced the delta almost into Mexico and it was customary for his successors to insert ornate cartouches which conveniently obliterated the unknown sources of both the Missouri and the Father of Waters. By 1720 an English geographer was able to state that “The Mississippi springs from several lakes to the westward of Hudson’s Bay and bending its course directly south falls through six channels into the Gulf of Mexico,” though he was less informed about its overall course and concluded, rather lamely, that “it is reported 800 leagues long and very probably it may be much longer.”
