to a close. Let us describe its last scene in the words of our accomplished historian:

"Two years afterward, sailing from Chicago to Mackinac, he entered a little river in Michigan. Erecting an altar, he said mass, after the rites of the Catholic church; then, begging the men who conducted his canoe to leave him alone for a half hour,

In the darkling wood,

Amid the cool and silence, he knelt down,
And offered to the mightiest solemn thanks
And supplication.'

At the end of the half hour they went to seek him, and he was no more. The good missionary, discoverer of a world, had fallen asleep on the margin of the stream that bears his name. Near its mouth, the canoe-men dug his grave in the sand. Ever after, the forest rangers, in their danger on Lake Michigan, would invoke his name. The people of the West will build his monument.'

"

The monument is not yet built; though the name of new counties in several of our western states testifies that the noble missionary is not altogether forgotten, in the land where he spent so many self-denying years.

* Bancroft's History of the United States, vol. iii., p. 161, es seq., where the reader may look for most of these dates.

Such was the voyageur priest; the first, in chronological order, of the succession of singular men who have explored and peopled the great West. And though many who have followed him have been his equals in courage and endurance, none have ever possessed the same combination of heroic and unselfish qualities. It ought not to be true that this brief and cursory sketch is the first distinct tribute yet paid to his virtues; for no worthier subject ever employed the pen of the poet or historian.

NOTE.-Struck with the fact that the history of this class of men, and of their enterprises and sufferings, has never been written, except by themselves in their simple "Journals” and ̧ "Relations" for the résumé given of these by Sparks, Bancroft, and others, is of necessity a mere unsatisfactory abstract -the writer has for some time been engaged in collecting and arranging materials, with the intention of .supplying the want. The authorities are numerous and widely scattered; and such a work ought to be thoroughly and carefully written, so that much time and labor lies between the author and his day of publication. Should he be spared, however, to finish the work, he hopes to present a picture of a class of men, displaying as much of true devotion, genuine courage, and self-denial, in the humble walk of the missionary, as the pages of history show in any other department of human enterprise.

5*

III.

THE PIONEER.

"I hear the tread of pioneers,

Of nations yet to be

The first low wash of waves where soon

Shall roll a human sea."

WHITTIER,

The axe rang sharply 'mid those forest shades
Which, from creation, toward the sky had towered
In unshorn beauty."

SIGOURNEY.

Next, in chronological order, after the missionary, came the military adventurer-of which class La Salle was the best representative. But the expeditions led by these men, were, for the most part, wild and visionary enterprises, in pursuit of unattainable ends. They were, moreover, unskilfully managed and unfortunately terminated - generally ending in the defeat, disappointment, and death of those who had set them on foot. They left no permanent impress upon the country; the most

THE PIONEER.