But we will take the eloquent and picturesque Bancroft as our guide—we cannot take a better:—“They floated down the calm magnificence of the ocean-stream, over the broad clear sand-bars—the resort of innumerable water-fowl—gliding past islets that swelled from the bosom of the streams, with their tufts of massive thickets, and between the wide plains of Illinois and Iowa, garlanded with majestic forests, or chequered by island groves and the open vastness of the prairie. “About sixty leagues below the mouth of the Wisconsin, they perceived on the western bank of the Mississippi the trail of men; and, leaving the canoes, Joliet and Marquette resolved alone to brave a meeting with the savages. After walking about six miles over beautiful prairie, they beheld one village on the banks of a river and two others on a distant slope. This river was the Moingona, now corrupted into Des Moines. Marquette and Joliet were the first white men who trod the soil of Iowa. Commending themselves to God, they raised a shout, on which four old men advanced slowly to meet them, bearing the peace-pipe, brilliant with many-coloured plumes. ‘We are Illinois,’ said they—that is, when translated, ‘We are men!’—and they offered the calumet. An aged chief received the strangers with great joy at his cabin, and the whole village gazed on them with friendly astonishment. “At a great council Marquette published to them the One true God, their Creator. He spoke, also, of the great captain of the French, the governor of Canada, who had chastised the Five Nations, and commanded peace; and he questioned them of the Mississippi and the tribes which possessed its banks. A magnificent feast of hominy, fish and the choicest viands from the prairies, was prepared for the messengers, who announced the subjection of the hated Iroquois. “After a delay of six days, the chieftain of the tribe and hundreds of warriors attended the strangers to their canoes. A peace-pipe, embellished with brilliant feathers—the mysterious arbiter of peace and war, the safeguard among the nations—was hung around Marquette as a parting gift. “The little group proceeded down the river. They passed the perpendicular rocks which wore the appearance of monsters; they heard at a distance the noise of the waters of the Mississippi, known to them by its Algonquin name of Pekitanoni; and when they came to the most beautiful confluence of rivers in the world, where the swifter Missouri rushes like a conqueror into the calmer Mississippi, dragging it, as it were, hastily to the sea, the good Marquette resolved in his heart one day to ascend the mighty river to its source, and then, descending a westerly flowing stream, to publish the gospel to all the people of this New World. “In a little less than forty leagues, the canoes floated past the confluence of the Ohio, then called the Wabash. Its banks were tenanted by the peaceful Shawanees, who had quailed under the incursions of the Iroquois.