Joseph River there stands a withered cedar, perhaps several hundred
years old, which bears scars that are believed to be the blaze marks of
the broad-bladed axes of the French explorers--made to indicate the place
where the portage out of the river began, the place which La Salle missed
when lost in the forest but afterward found, where Father Gabriel made
several crosses, as Hennepin records, on the trees--perhaps these very
marks-and where La Salle left letters for the guidance over the prairie of
those "who were to come in the vessel"--thinking of the captain of the
Griffin who was ordered to follow him to the Illinois on his return.
It is only a little more than a league from this landing at the bend of
the river (which has given the name "South Bend" to the town) across the
"large prairie" to the wet meadows in whose ooze the tortuous Kankakee
River became navigable, in La Salle's day, a hundred paces from its
source, and increased so rapidly in volume that, as he says in a letter,
"in a short time it becomes as broad and deep as the Marne"--the Marne
which he knew in his boyhood and for which any but his iron heart must
have longed.
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