Ange was yielding
Fort Chartres to the English and crossing the Mississippi, I am able to
show that my own ancestral sympathies while dwelling on the frontiers were
not with the French. But I quote it chiefly because he was a typical
forerunner, a first frontiersman.
Like the coureur de bois Nicolas Perrot, of exactly a century before, he
was only the dawn of the light--the light of another day, which was
beginning to appear in the valley. For it was he who led Daniel Boone to
the first exploring and settling of that wilderness south of the Ohio,
which, to quote further from the paper called the _Western World_,
[Footnote _Western World_, published at Frankfort, Ky., 1806-8, by John
Wood and Joseph M. Street.] had a soil "more fat and fertile than Egypt"--
and was the place where "Pan, if he ever existed, held dominion unmolested
of Ceres or Lucinia."
Such was the almost soundless beginning of what soon developed into a
mighty "processional," its rumblings of wagons and shoutings of drivers on
land and blowing of conches on the rivers increasing, accompanied by the
sound of rushing waters, the cry of frightened birds, and the thunders of
crashing trees.
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