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

1673.] A REAL DANGER. 69ened him ;and his imagination and that of his credulouscompanions was so wrought upon by theseunhallowed efforts of Indian art,that they continuedfor a long time to talk of them as they plied theirpaddles. They were thus engaged, when they weresuddenly aroused by a real danger. A torrent ofyellow mud rushed furiously athwart thecalm bluecurrent of the Mississippi, boiling and surging, andsweeping in its course logs, branches, and uprootedtrees. They had reached the mouth of the Missouri,where that savage river, descending from its madcareer through a vast unknown of barbarism, pouredits turbid floods into the bosom of its gentler sister.Their light canoes whirled on the miry vortex likedry leaves on an angry brook. "I never," writesMarquette, "saw anything more terrific;" but theyescaped with their fright, and held their way downthe turbulent and swollen current of the now unitedrivers. 1They passed the lonely forest that coveredBitters." Some years ago, certain persons, with more zeal thanknowledge, proposed to restore the figures, after conceptions oftheir own ; but the idea was abandoned.Marquette made a drawing of the two monsters, but it is lost. Ihave, however, a fac-simile of a map made a few years later, byorder of the Intendant Duchesneau, which is decorated with theportrait of one of them, answering to Marquette's description, andprobably copied from his drawing. St. Cosme, who saw them in1699, says that they were even then almost effaced. Douay andJoutel also speak of them, — the former, bitterly hostile to hisJesuit contemporaries, charging Marquette with exaggeration inhis account of them. Joutel could see nothing terrifying in theirappearance ; but he says that his Indians made sacrifices to themas they passed.1The Missouri is called " Pekitanoui " by Marquette. It also