CHAPTER XI
WESTERN CITIES THAT HAVE SPRUNG FROM FRENCH FORTS
It is a strange and varied crop that has grown from the leaden plates with
French inscriptions, planted by St. Lusson, La Salle, and Celoron by lakes
and rivers in that western country. The mythical story of the sowing of
Cadmus in the Boeotian field is again rather tame by comparison with a
true relation of what has actually occurred within the memory of a few
generations in a valley as wild when Celoron traversed the course of La
Belle Riviere (the name given by the French to the Ohio, which was known
to the Indians as the "River of the Whitecaps") with his little fleet only
a century and a half ago as was Boeotia when Cadmus set out from Phoenicia
in search of his sister, Europa (that is, Europe), back beyond the memory
of history.
It was a bourgeoning, most miraculous, in those spots of the west, a new
Europa, where soldiers sprang up immediately upon the sowing, like the
sproutings of Cadmus' dragon's teeth, to fight one another and to build
strongholds that should some day be cities, even as Cadmea, the fortress
of the "Spartoi," became the city of Thebes.
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