It is a strange and varied crop that has grown from the leaden plates with French inscriptions, planted by St. Lusson, La Salle, and Céloron by lakes and rivers in that western country. The mythical story of the sowing of Cadmus in the Boeotian field is again rather tame by comparison with a true relation of what has actually occurred within the memory of a few generations in a valley as wild when Céloron traversed the course of La Belle Rivière (the name given by the French to the Ohio, which was known to the Indians as the "River of the Whitecaps") with his little fleet only a century and a half ago as was Boeotia when Cadmus set out from Phoenicia in search of his sister, Europa (that is, Europe), back beyond the memory of history. It was a bourgeoning, most miraculous, in those spots of the west, a new Europa, where soldiers sprang up immediately upon the sowing, like the sproutings of Cadmus' dragon's teeth, to fight one another and to build strongholds that should some day be cities, even as Cadmea, the fortress of the "Spartoi," became the city of Thebes. So, in this sowing, did France become the mother of western cities, of Pittsburgh and Buffalo, of Erie, of St. Louis, of Detroit and New Orleans, of Peoria and St. Joseph, and still other cities whose names have never been heard by the people--of France--even as Phoenicia, in the wanderings of her adventurous son, Cadmus, became the mother of Thebes and the godmother of Greek culture and of European literature. Palamedes and Simonides added some letters to the alphabet brought, according to tradition, by Cadmus to Greece, and Cadmus suffered the doom of those who sow dragon's teeth, as France has suffered, but still is his name kept in the memory of every school child; and so should be remembered those who planted the lead plates and sowed the teeth that sprang into the "Spartoi" of a new civilization.