refused to believe? He was quick to perceive that, except the priests, the one sole object of all these warring people was pecuniary advantage. This, indeed, was rendered imperative by the European system of life. As a rule the French were the most humane, the most just; they treated the natives more as if they might be human beings with sensitiveness and intelligence. William Penn, and his followers among the English, and the Hudson Bay Company, also dealt justly with them, but in the eyes of the others the Amerind was a beast of the forest to be exterminated. The French sent their missionaries and traders far to the West and before long had acquired a hold on the continent equal to that of the Spaniards; a hold which it then seemed impossible should ever be lessened. Raddison, the French trader, is said to have been on the head of the Mississippi as early as 1660. Marquette and Joliet, the former a priest, the latter a trader, were sent by Frontenac, in 1673, to search for a route across the Wilderness to the Pacific by way of a great river, of which much was told by the natives. The river indicated was doubtless the Columbia. Proceeding from Michigan they finally came at the mouth of the Wisconsin to the river forming the eastern boundary of the vaster Wilderness, the Mississippi, called by Marquette Conception, and down it they went, instead of up, as they should have gone to get on the track to the Pacific, their birch-bark canoes gliding swiftly along, while the unfathomed waters for the first time heard the song of the _Voyageur_. Down they went to Soto's burial-place. They were encroaching on the claims of the Spaniards, but boundaries then were as nebulous as the Milky Way, and the sword was the instrument of survey by which all lines were drawn. Their flag was finally carried through to the mouth of the Mississippi by that splendid character Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle,[51] a Frenchman whose qualities shine ever undimmed by the roll of fading centuries. With Tonty and Hennepin he came through the Great Lakes, and, leaving these two men behind, reached with his party the Mississippi at the mouth of the Illinois, and proceeding down it finally, in 1682, standing at the delta beside a great claim-post, he proclaimed the jurisdiction of Louis the Great (XIV.) over all this country of "Louisiana,"