The Smile of Peace. By GERTRUDE CHRISTIAN FOSDICK Kissed her brow where Like a halo resting there And as I gazed on the lovely old face But in striving to paint the wondrous play I found it beyond my noble art But But believe they yet will be, I earnestly trust that they will make good the claim that La Salle was the earliest visitor to Chicago. No city could ask for a more famous ancestor. He was the real discoverer of the Mississippi as a whole. The Spaniards had reached its lower windings prior to his day, his own countrymen had explored its upper waters delasall is inclined to hold that the first civilized man who crossed the Chicago Portage was the dauntless pioneer, René Robert Cavelier Sieur de la Salle. We know that two years of his life in America are involved in obscurity, and his own journal and maps relating to this period, though in the possession of one of his relatives a century later, have disappeared. an anonymous manuscript exists purporting to contain an account of his explorations during these years, related by La Salle himself. This states that in 1671 La Salle set forth on Lake Erie, crossed Lake Huron, passed the Straits of Mackinac, and La Baye des Puants, which we call Green Bay, and discovered an incomparably larger bay, which doubtless was the southern part of Lake Michigan. At its foot towards the west he found "a very good port," and at the end of this a stream going from the east to the west. This port, it is thought by Francis Parkman, whose opinion is of the utmost weight, may have been the entrance to the Chicago River, and the stream, the Des Plaines branch of the Illinois. The words usually translated, very good port, tres beau havre, may, without violence, be also rendered very beautiful harbor, and thus become a tribute to the Chicago River, and a more complimentary description of it than La Salle gave after a subsequent visit. If this manuscript is correct, La Salle was at the site of Chicago two years before Joliet and Marquette. It is confirmed to some extent by a map apparently made in 1673; but the exact truth of the matter will probably never be known until those documents come to light which La Salle's aged niece, Miss Madeline Cavelier, had in her possession in the year 1756. She wrote then to her nephew: "I have waited for a safe opportunity to send you the papers of M. de la Salle. There are some maps which I have attached to these papers." The safe opportunity seems never to have come, and there is no trace of these precious manuscripts after the date of this letter, although the most careful search has been made. When they are found, as I Fac-Simile of La Salle's Autograph. perhaps before he saw it, but he was the first to unite these discoveries, the first to navigate the mighty stream from the mouth of the Illinois River to the Gulf of Mexico, and the first to take possession of its matchless valley for civilization. He was the real discoverer of the Great West, for he planned its occupation and began its settlement; and he alone of the men of his time appreciated its boundless possibilities, and with prophetic eye saw in the future its wide area peopled by his own race. It seems very fitting that a city which is the incarnation of the energy, the courage, and the enterprise which animated his iron frame should begin its annals with the splendid name of La Salle. Assuming, then, that he was the first, the next visitors to Chicago, who are usually spoken of as the earliest, were Louis Jolliet, usually written Joliet, and Jacques (James) Marquette. Returning from their famous journey on the Mississippi River, they doubtless crossed the Portage from the Des Plaines River to the South Branch, and went by way of the Chicago River to Lake Michigan, and along its western shore to the present Green Bay, in the late summer or early fall of the year 1673. Father Marquette in his narrative of this journey mentions the river, that is the Illinois, which brought |