The things we do!

Of that I shall speak later.
Here we celebrate merely the fact that there are fifty or sixty million
geographical descendants of France living in the midst of the valley at
the mouth of whose river La Salle took immediate possession for Louis XIV,
but prophetic possession for all the peoples that might in any time find
dwelling there.


CHAPTER IX
IN THE TRAILS OF THE COUREURS DE BOIS

"It is a mistake," said one of the statesmen of the Mississippi Valley,
Senator Thomas H. Benton, "to suppose that none but men of science lay off
a road. There is a class of topographical engineers older than the schools
and more unerring than the mathematicians. They are the wild animals--
buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, bears-which traverse the forest not by
compass but by an instinct which leads them always the right way-to the
lowest passes in the mountains, the shallowest fords in the rivers, the
richest pastures in the forests, the best salt springs, and the shortest
practicable lines between remote points.


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