Four Months in a Sneak-Box: A Boat Voyage of 2600 Miles Down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and Along the Gulf of Mexico — John Shaqi
Four Months in a Sneak-Box: A Boat Voyage of 2600 Miles Down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and Along the Gulf of MexicoBishop, Nathaniel H. (Nathaniel Holmes)
General
Four Months in a Sneak-Box: A Boat Voyage of 2600 Miles Down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and Along the Gulf of Mexico
Bishop, Nathaniel H. (Nathaniel Holmes)
Boats and boating; Mississippi River -- Description and travel; Ohio River -- Description and travel
The second manuscript map of Galine'e, made about the year 1672, has
upon it this inscription: "River Ohio, so called by the Iroquois on
account of its beauty, which the Sieur de la Salle descended." It was
probably the interpretation of the Iroquois word Ohio which caused the
French frequently to designate this noble stream as "La belle
rivire."
A little later the missionary Marquette designed a map, upon which he
calls the Ohio the "Ouabouskiaou." Louis Joliet's first map gives the
Ohio without a name, but supplies its place with an inscription
stating that La Salle had descended it. In Joliet's second map he
calls the Ohio "Ouboustikou."
After the missionaries and other explorers had given to the world the
knowledge possessed at that early day of the great west, a young and
talented engineer of the French government, living in Quebec, and
named Jean Baptiste Louis Franquelin, completed, in 1684, the most
elaborate map of the times, a carefully traced copy of which, through
the courtesy of Mr. Francis Parkman, I have been allowed to examine.
The original map of Franquelin has recently disappeared, and is
supposed to have been destroyed. This map is described in the appendix
to Mr. Parkman's "Discovery of the Great West," as being "six feet
long and four and a half wide." On it, the Ohio is called "Fleuve St.
Louis, ou Chucagoa, ou Casquinampogamou;" but the appellation of
"River St. Louis" was dropped very soon after the appearance of
Franquelin's map, and to the present time it justly retains the
Iroquois name given it by its brave discoverer La Salle.
It would be interesting to know by which of the routes used by the
Indians in those early days La Salle travelled to the Ohio. After the
existence of the Ohio was made known, the first route made use of in
reaching that river by the coureurs de bois and other French
travellers from Canada, was that from the southern shore of Lake Erie,
from a point near where the town of Westfield now stands, across the
wilderness by portage southward about nine miles to Chautaugue Lake.
These parties used light bark canoes, which were easily carried upon
the shoulders of men whenever a "carry" between the two streams became
necessary. The canoes were paddled on the lake to its southern end,
out of which flowed a shallow brook, which afforded water enough in
places to float the frail craft. The shoal water, and the obstructions
made by fallen trees, necessitated frequent portages. This wild and
tortuous stream led the voyagers to the Alleghany River, where an
ample depth of water and a propitious current carried them into the
Ohio.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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