It is amusing, as well as instructive, to observe how little importance the travellers gave to the river Ohio, in their geographical assumptions. In the map published by Marquette with his "Journal," the "_Ouabisquigou_" as he denominates it, in euphonious French-Indian, compared to the Illinois or even to the Wisconsin, is but an inconsiderable rivulet! The lonely wanderers were much farther from the English settlements than they supposed; a mistake into which they must have been led, by hearing of the incursions of the Iroquois; for even at that early day they could not but know that the head-waters of the Ohio were not distant from the hunting-grounds of that warlike confederacy. Even this explanation, however, scarcely lessens our wonder that they should have known so little of courses and distances; for had this river been as short as it is here delineated, they would have been within four hundred miles of Montreal. After leaving the Ohio, they suffered much from the climate and its incidents; for they were now approaching, in the middle of July, a region of perpetual summer. Mosquitoes and other venomous insects (in that region we might even call them _ravenous_ insects) became intolerably annoying; and the _voyageurs_ began to think they had reached the country of the terrible heats, which, as they had been warned in the north, "would wither them up like a dry leaf." But the prospect of death by torture and savage cruelty had not daunted them, and they were not now disposed to be turned back by any excess of climate. Arranging their sails in the form of awnings to protect them from the sun by day and the dews by night, they resolutely pursued their way.