But this is not the all of the tragic story. The _Griffin_ carried in her the prophecies of other than lake vessels. She had in her hold on that fateful trip the cordage and iron for the pioneer of the river ships. So when she went down she spoke to the waters that engulfed her the two dreams of her builder and commander: one dream the navigation of the lakes and the other the coursing of the western rivers. The Spanish council which decreed long ago that "if it had pleased God that ... rivers should have been navigable, He would not have wanted human assistance to make them such" would be horrified by the sacrilege that has been committed and is being contemplated by the followers of the men of the _Griffin_. They have made a canal around the Falls (which Hennepin first saw breathing a cloud of mist over the great abyss)--a canal that, supplemented by other canals along the St. Lawrence River, allows vessels of fourteen-foot draught to go from Lake Erie to Montreal and so on to the sea. If this achievement were put into the poetry of legend it would show the outwitting of the dragon. They have deepened the straits where the _Griffin_ had to wait for favorable breezes and soundings to pass from Erie to Huron--the Symplegades (clashing rocks) of the new-world voyage. They have made canals on either side of the Sault Ste. Marie--the rapids of the St. Mary's River, by the side of which St. Lusson took formal possession of all that northern empire and Father Allouez made his extraordinary address--canals through which sixty-two million tons passed in 1910 toward the east and south. They have made and deepened harbors all the way around the shores till ships two hundred times the size of the _Griffin_ can ride in them. Yet this is not all. The symbols of La Salle's vision revived in the lakes memories of the days when their waters ran through the Mississippi Valley to the gulf--the very course which La Salle's unborn _Griffin_ was to take. When the continent tilted a little to the east and in the tilting poured the water of the upper lakes over the Niagara edge into the St. Lawrence, that same tilting stopped the overflow down into the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico at the other end of the lakes. But so slight was the tilting that the water still sweeps over, in places, when the lakes are high, and sometimes even carries light boats across. Of late engineers have, in effect, been undoing with levels and scoops and dredges what nature did in a mighty upheaval. They are practically tipping the bowls back the other way and so making currents to run down the old channel toward the gulf through the valleys of the Des Plaines and the Illinois to the Mississippi.