The children's hour - v. 8 Author:Eva March Tappan Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE MEN WHO EXPLORED THE MISSISSIPPI By Eva March Tappan IN 1675, at the time of King Philip's War, there were colonies in all the states bordering on the ... more »Altantic from Maine to South Carolina, and they were all subject to England. Most of the French settlements were on the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. The Indians had told the French of a mighty stream to the southward; and whenever a group of Frenchmen were sitting around the fire some long evening in the little village of Montreal, some one was sure to ask, "Where do you suppose the Mississippi River empties?" "The men who went with the Spaniard, De Soto, declared that it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico," one would reply. Another would retort, "That tale is a hundred years old. De Soto went off on a wild-goose chase to search for gold. He did not find any, and of course his men had to tell some big story when they came back." Then another would say more thoughtfully, " The Indians who live to the west of us declare that far to the west of them are strange people who have no beards. They must be Chinese, and I believe that the Mississippi flows into the Pacific Ocean. Whatfortunes we could make if we could only find that river and trade with China!" "Who knows whether there is any river?" another would demand laughingly. "The Indians talk about ' big water,' but who can tell whether they mean a great river or the ocean ?" There was a young man named Robert la Salle who was so much interested in this mysterious stream that he thought of it by day and dreamed of it by night. At last he made up his mind to go in search of it. He had little money to pay for canoes and provisions and presents for the Indians through whose country he must pass, but he owned some land eight or nine miles from Montreal. So he so...« less