" [Footnote: "Life on the Mississippi," Hillcrest edition, pp.
19, 20]
In 1682 La Salle followed it to where it meets the great gulf, possessing
with emblems of empire and his indomitable spirit the lower reaches of the
stream whose upper waters had first been touched by the gentle Marquette
and the practical Joliet and the vainglorious Hennepin. Between that day
and the time when it became a course of regular and active commerce (again
in Mark Twain's chronology), "seven sovereigns had occupied the throne of
England, America had become an independent nation, Louis XIV and Louis XV
had rotted--the French monarchy had gone down in the red tempest of the
Revolution--and Napoleon was a name that was beginning to be talked
about." [Footnote: "Life on the Mississippi," p. 20.] Of what befell in
that period, marked by such figures and events, a later chapter will tell.
Here our thought is of the river itself, the river of "a hundred thousand
affluents," as one has characterized it; the river which for a little time
bore through the valley of Louisiana and of the Illinois the name of the
great French minister "Colbert.
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