Why the Illinois should ever have been called the Divine, it is not easy to see. The Memoirs of St. Simon suggest an explanation. Madame de Frontenac and her friend, Mademoiselle d'Outrelaise, he tells us, lived together in apartments at the Arsenal, where they held their _salon_ and exercised a great power in society. They were called at court _les Divines_.--St. Simon, v. 835 (Cheruel). In compliment to Frontenac, the river may have been named after his wife or her friend. The suggestion is due to M. Margry. I have seen a map by Raudin, Frontenac's engineer, on which the river is called "Riviere de la Divine ou l'Outrelaise."] They set their canoes on this thread of water, embarked their baggage and themselves, and pushed down the sluggish streamlet, looking, at a little distance, like men who sailed on land. Fed by an unceasing tribute of the spongy soil, it quickly widened to a river; and they floated on their way through a voiceless, lifeless solitude of dreary oak barrens, or boundless marshes overgrown with reeds. At night, they built their fire on ground made firm by frost, and bivouacked among the rushes. A few days brought them to a more favored region. On the right hand and on the left stretched the boundless prairie, dotted with leafless groves and bordered by gray wintry forests; scorched by the fires kindled in the dried grass by Indian hunters, and strewn with the carcasses and the bleached skulls of innumerable buffalo. The plains were scored with their pathways, and the muddy edges of the river were full of their hoof-prints. Yet not one was to be seen. At night, the horizon glowed with distant fires; and by day the savage hunters could be descried at times roaming on the verge of the prairie. The men, discontented and half-starved, would have deserted to them had they dared. La Salle's Mohegan could kill no game except two lean deer, with a few wild geese and swans. At length, in their straits, they made a happy discovery. It was a buffalo bull, fast mired in a slough. They killed him, lashed a cable about him, and then twelve men dragged out the shaggy monster whose ponderous carcass demanded their utmost efforts. [Footnote: I remember to have seen an incident precisely similar, many years ago, on the Upper Arkansas. In this case, however, it was impossible to drag the bull from the mire. Though hopelessly entangled, he made furious plunges at his assailants before being shot. Hennepin's account of the buffalo, which he afterwards had every opportunity of seeing, is interesting and true.]