The first of
these portages is that path of which I have already spoken several times
(and which I never tire of letting my imagination travel again), the one
over which Nicolet must have passed from the Fox River into the Wisconsin
River, if he got so far on his way to Muscovy--the path to which Father
Dablon said the way was as through a paradise, but was as hard as the way
to heaven [Footnote: "If the country ... somewhat resembles an earthly
paradise in beauty, the way leading to it may be said to bear some
likeness to the one depicted by our Lord as leading to Heaven."--"Jesuit
Relations" (Thwaites), 55:191.]--the path which the coureurs de bois
Radisson and Groseilliers doubtless followed; the path which La Salle may
have found in those two years of mysterious absence in the valley; the
path Marquette and Joliet and hundreds after them certainly took on their
way from Montreal to the Mississippi or from the Mississippi back to
Montreal. You would not know this narrow strip--not a mile wide--to be a
watershed dividing the continent, the north from the south; you would not
know it for the threshold to the Mississippi Valley.
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