La Salle and the discovery of the great West - North Central ...

;1680.] FALLS OF ST. ANTHONY. 267skin. Thus equipped, they began their journey, andsoon approached the Falls of St. Anthony, so namedby Hennepin in honor of the inevitable Saint Anthonyof Padua. 1 As they were carrying their canoe bythe cataract, they saw five or six Indians, who hadgone before, and one of whom had climbed into anoak-tree beside the principal fall, whence in a loudand lamentable voice he was haranguing the spirit ofthe waters, as a sacrifice to whom he had just hung arobe of beaver-skin among the branches. 2 Theirattention was soon engrossed by another object.Looking over the edge of the cliff which overhungthe river below the falls, Hennepin saw a snake,1 Hennepin's notice of the Falls of St. Anthony, though brief, issufficiently accurate. He says, in his first edition, that they areforty or fifty feet high, but adds ten feet more in the edition of1697. In 1821, according to Schoolcraft, the perpendicular fallmeasured forty feet. Great changes, however, have taken placehere, and are still in progress. The rock is a very soft, friablesandstone, overlaid by a stratum of limestone ; and it is crumblingwith such rapidity under the action of the water that the cataractwill soon be little more than a rapid. Other changes equally disastrous,in an artistic point of view, are going on even more quickly.Beside the falls stands a city, which, by an ingenious combinationof the Greek and Sioux languages, has received the name of Minneapolis,or City of the Waters, and which in 1867 contained tenthousand inhabitants, two national banks, and an opera-housewhile its rival city of St. Anthony, immediately opposite, boasted agigantic water-cure and a State university. In short, the greatnatural beauty of the place is utterly spoiled.2Oanktayhee, the principal deity of the Sioux, was supposed tolive under these falls, though he manifested himself in the form ofa buffalo. It was he who created the earth, like the AlgonquinManabozho, from mud brought to him in the paws of a musk-rat.Carver, in 1766, saw an Indian throw everything he had about himinto the cataract as an offering to this deity.//