Joliet, in 1673, suggested the lakes-to-the-gulf ship waterway, [Footnote:
Margry, 1:268.] and by the three-hundredth anniversary, perhaps, it will
be completed.
I made a journey in 1911 that began at the first settlements of the French
in Nova Scotia, touched the Bay of Chaleur and the lower St. Lawrence, and
then followed the French water paths all the way to the mouth of the
Mississippi, where the master of pilots, a descendant of France, carried
me out into the Gulf of Mexico. Starting back before dawn in a little
boat, I saw, just as the sun was coming up over the swamps where the river
begins to divide, the hulk of a great seagoing vessel against the morning
sky. It seemed then a gloomy apparition; but as I think of it now it was
rather the presage of the new commerce than the ghost of that which has
departed.
That the Valley of a Hundred Thousand Streams--streams that together touch
every community of any size from the Alleghanies to the Rockies--streams
whose waters all find their way sooner or later into the Mississippi--will
ever give up battle till the great water itself is conquered, no one who
knows the determined people in that valley will ever question.
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