The things we do!

It was but a great waterfall to La Salle and Tonty and Hennepin--an
impeding, noisy, hostile object. And to the half-mutinous, quarrelsome
workmen (French, Flemings, Italians) it was a demon, no doubt, whose very
breath froze their beards into icicles. It was, in reality, potentially
the most beneficent single, incarnate force bounded by any one horizon of
sky, in that new world, developed by the tipping of the continent a little
to the eastward after the upper lakes had been formed and the consequent
emptying of their waters into the St. Lawrence instead of the Gulf of
Mexico.
In January, 1679, a file of burdened men, some thirty in number, toiling
slowly on their way over the snowy plains and "through the gloomy forests
of spruce and naked oak trees," the priest accompanying with his altar
lashed to his back, reached a favorable spot beside calm water several
miles above the cataract: the site is identified as situate a little way
above the mouth of Cayuga Creek, just outside the village of La Salle, in
the State of New York.


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