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

486 APPENDIX.corresponds in position with the St. Peter, but it correspondsin nothing else ; and the populous nations whom hefound on it— the Eokoros, theEsanapes, and the Gnacsitares,no less than their neighbors the Mozeemlek and theTahuglauk — are as real as the nations visited by CaptainGulliver. But La Hontan did not, like Hennepin, addslander and plagiarism to mendacity, or seek to appropriateto himself the credit of genuine discoveries made by others.Mathieu Sagean is a personage less known than Hennepinor La Hontan; for though he surpassed them both infertility of invention, he was illiterate, and never made abook. In 1701, being then a soldier in a company ofmarines at Brest, he revealed a secret which he declaredthat he had locked within his breast for twenty years, havingbeen unwilling to impart it to the Dutch and English,in whose service he had been during the whole period.His story was written down from his dictation, and sent tothe minister Ponchartrain. It is preserved in the BibliothequeNationale, and in 1863 it was printed by Mr. Shea.He was born, he declares, at La Chine in Canada, andengaged in the service of La Salle about twenty years beforethe revelation of his secret; that is, in 1681. Hence,he would have been, at the utmost, only fourteen years old,as La Chine did not exist before 1667. He was with LaSalle at the building of Fort St. Louis of the Illinois, andwas left here as one of a hundred men under command ofTonty. Tonty, it is to be observed, had but a small fractionof this number; and Sagean describes the fort in amanner which shows that he never saw it.Being desirousof making some new discovery, he obtained leave fromTonty, and set out with eleven other Frenchmen and twoMohegan Indians. They ascended the Mississippi a hundredand fifty leagues, carried their canoes by a cataract,went forty leagues farther, and stopped a month to hunt.