stances that roughen its surface, that we should deem it a meanspirited surrender of the honour due to our mundane rank, to leave any considerable district in the humble condition of merely being shone upon by the sun, pastured by the cattle, tilled and reaped by the men, speckled here and there with houses, and, perhaps, loaded in some part with a ponderous town. The district is not

to be contented with so vulgar a share of the world's fortunes. It cannot be satisfied it has any respectable existence, till it is raised into renown by a costly topographical quarto, or even, if it is a particularly ambitious lot of acres, by the whole graphical and typographical honours of an imperial folio. These tributes of respect to our soil, and to what it carries, are multiplying so prodigiously, that if any account is to be kept of their number, and any reckoning of their cost, nothing could be more lucky and oppor tune than that the Americans, not wanting him for any such purpose themselves, have sent us Zerah Colburn, the youthful prodigy of computing faculties. And if it were possible we could a little extend the homestead of our territory-if we could get secure possession of a small segment of one of the northern departments of France, or a few parishes in the quarter of Walcheren, or a reasonable piece of Zealand, what a multiform and crowding accession a few months would bring to the vast accumulation of descriptions, surveys, sketches, and local histories, which have illustrated our present allotment of Europe.

All this while, those Americans are leaving hundreds of thousands of their square miles without an adventure of research, a measurement, a map, a Flora, or a set of views; leaving them, with barely or hardly the distinction of a name, to display the va rious aspects of climates, and the changing aspects of seasons, for the unparticipated and unenvied entertainment of elks and buffaloes, bears, rattle-snakes, bull-frogs, and the constantly diminishing remainder of a genus of animals still wilder. If they are occasionally moved, by some commercial prospect, to send a deputation of eyes across a few parallels of the hemisphere, it is marvellous to find how little shall at last be brought back besides the implements of sight themselves-at least, how little shall be reported for the benefit and amusement of the inquisitive multitudes of us that cannot afford to carry our own eyes so far. The meager publication of Patrick Gass is nearly all that we have yet gained of the story and results of the late expedition from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean, and back again. But perhaps all in good time. Every thing that we do here, they, in due season, will do there. There exists, in unmarked spots, in the neighbourhood of the Atlantic, in that of the Ohio, of the Missouri, of the Columbia, clay that is destined to be one day dignified into bricks, and raised into structures, where royal quarto and folio shall be manufactured, and Paternoster-rows whence they will issue out in

the combined splendour of wisdom, wit, sentiment and the fine arts. Indefatigable Time has been "progressing" ever since the patriarchs of the plains of the Ohio used to stock their farms with Mammoths, and those on the east side of the Alleghany mountains enjoyed, at the foot of those mountains, their inexhaustible beds of oysters, of which the animal portion was as large as a man's foot. The age has come that sees ample regions for republics or kingdoms between that line to which the Atlantic ocean then extended, and the line which bounds it now; and the age will be sure to come of picturesque journeys, and sentimental tours, with the humbler benefits of statistics and topographies.

This class of works, however, must be preceded by one of less pretension, though considerably advanced towards a character of refinement, and a literary execution, beyond the coarse ignorance of the journal of the mere Indian trader or hunter of buffaloes. The works of this previous class must come from men who unite all the hardihood and practical rough seasoning of men of the woods, with a tolerable share of cultivation, and a natural tendency to inquisitiveness and reflection. Some such men will be found to undertake toilsome, protracted, and hazardous journeys of research-will ascertain positions, distances, practicable routes, and the course of rivers-will describe clearly, though not in the style of either artists or poets, the aspects of the country, and the more obvious circumstances in the character of its productions, and of its brute or human inhabitants-and will make some observations, some comparisons, some conjectures, a little deeper than the absolute surface of the objects they contemplate, some slight openings into speculations, which more philosophical minds will long afterwards prosecute, with the aid of later, accumulated, and more accurate observations. The Travels of the late Major Pike* to the head of the Mississippi, and across Louisiana, may be regarded as a hopeful beginning of this class of works, and we wish that other such adventurers may be in preparation, and that the American government may deem this much more ambitious employment for them, than the vulgar occupations of war.

The work before us is not a book of travels, though the author professes to have had personal observation of much of what it describes. It is an irregular mixture of natural and civil historywith political geography. The copy now in our possession is, we have some reason to believe, almost the only one which has yet reached this country; on which account, we shall make no apology for presenting our readers with a much more copious examination

We say the "late" because we have little doubt that this spirited, intelligent, and indefatigable explorer is the General Pike whom, in the capacity of second in com mand to General Dearborn, in Canada, the recent accounts mention to have fallen in battle.

of its contents, than we should have judged expedient had the work been an ordinary commodity of the market.

"It fell to my lot," says the major, "in the month of March, 1804, to take possession of Upper Louisiana, under the treaty of cession. The high civil trust confided to me in that country, drew my attention in the first instance to the jurisprudence, in the second to the principles of the French and Spanish colonial governments, and in the third to the civil history and geography of those regions. The records and other public documents were open to my inspection; and, as it was my fortune to be stationed about five years on various parts of the lower Mississippi, and nearly six months on Red River, my inquiries gradually extended to Louisiana in general. The country, even at this day, is less known than any other (inhabited by a civilized people) of the same extent on the globe.

"The United States suddenly and unexpectedly acquired a territory of which they knew not the extent; they were equally unacquainted with its climates, soils, and productions, the magnitude and importance of its numerous rivers, and its commercial and other natural advantages. I therefore indulge the expectation, that the subsequent sketches, however inaccurate or erroneous, will not prove wholly unacceptable to the public; particularly as no one before me, to my knowledge, has attempted a history and description of this territory."

He notices the well known policy of the Spaniards, while they possessed the country, in excluding strangers, and “prohibiting all surveys and discoveries, except for the use of the cabinet." He says the accounts published by missionaries, and even by French officers, "are mostly uninteresting," and those of "Indian traders, and other transient persons, extremely crude, confused, and contradictory." He made, however, the best use of them he could. He has also had access to some ancient manuscript journals; has been furnished by respectable men, in most of the districts, with local and other information; his own excursions in the country have been extensive; and he has examined most of the published works, whether of more or less authority, concerning the country and its history. He confesses, however, that all the yet existing materials are very far from sufficient for the construction of any thing even distantly approaching to a satisfactory work; apologizes for the additional imperfections which he is likely to fall into, from the military habits of his life; and at the same time modestly and very reasonably thinks he has produced a much better account of this large section of the American continent than has yet appeared.-We could not advance far in the perusal, without receiving an impression of good sense, sobriety, industrious inquiry, and a prevailing wish to exhibit the plain truth on every subject.

The first chapter, constituting nearly a fourth part of the

volume, is entitled "Historical Sketches." It commences with the discovery and the first attempts to colonize the Atlantic coast, and the northern shores of the Mexican gulf, and gradually draws to a more defined and limited scope, in recording the events of the portion of the country now denominated Louisiana. It is written with a very respectable degree of clearness and succinctness, and preserves the detail from the tediousness which it was not easy to avoid in recording so many transactions of obscure and petty warfare, absurd policy, and vulgar villany. The first adventurer that made an inroad from Florida into the region since named Louisiana, was Ferdinand de Soto.

"He was one of the most distinguished knight-errants of his age; and his actions in Florida sufficiently attest his courage, hardihood, and romantic turn of mind. He explored almost all parts of that country with the speed of a courier; and the long time he remained in it was mostly employed in seeking new dangers and encountering them. He attacked the natives everywhere, and everywhere committed great slaughter; destroyed their towns and subsisted his men on the provisions found in them. He even spent some winters among them, particularly one in the Chickasaw nation; the next spring crossed the Mississippi, explored the regions to the westward of it, and in 1542 ended his days on Red River."

Every thing was most zealously perpetrated by the Spaniards that could make the region still more emphatically a wilderness than they found it, and render it more inhospitable and ungainful to themselves against the time when they were reduced (after numerous abortive and destructive enterprises, in sanguine and furious search after the precious metals) to the necessity and humiliation of trying to sustain themselves by cultivating the ground, and trafficking with the relics of those native tribes whom they had so nearly destroyed. The desolate scene was, for a while, contested with them by the French; and reciprocal acts of revenge and extermination afforded a consolatory spectacle to the few barbarian stragglers who were themselves too weak to perform such a sacrifice: but the French were compelled to quit the shores of the Mexican gulf, and for a number of years forbore all further attempts on any part of America. At length, in 1608, they laid the foundation of Quebec, and formed their first permanent settlement in the new world. This settlement, having maintained a laborious and wretched existence during sixty years of war with the Iroquois, fell upon an expedient of ingenious novelty, which, by singular good luck, occurred to the thoughts of the Indians much about the same time. This expedient was the making of a peace. The few survivors on both sides bethought themselves of substituting a commerce in the commodities of life

to the interchange of the missiles of death. But our author says the French, like the Spaniards, were so incurably infected with the ideas of obtaining wealth in a way independent of all regular and sober industry, that they were never brought to apply themselves in earnest to the cultivation of the soil, and therefore never attained, even to the very period of the transfer of Canada from the French dominion, any thing like a state of real prosperity. They were also incommoded in their Indian trade, by the active interference and competition of the English, who had early supplanted the Dutch in the establishment of New-York. They had a better position, however, and perhaps a more ambitious restlessness, for extending their inquiries into the interior of the vast continent. Two of their missionaries, Jolliet and Marquette, traversed the lakes, reached the Mississippi, descended it as far as the Arkansas, a distance of nearly a thousand miles, and returned to Canada by way of the Illinois. But an enterprising officer, De la Salle, was the first that descended that vast river to the sea; though Father Hennepin, whom our author has given very good reasons for setting down for an "egregious liar," tended to have accomplished this great achievement, in a splendid account which he published, in France, of the extensive country he had discovered, and which he named Louisiana, in honour of Louis XIV.

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De la Salle also went to France, where he was appointed to the command of an expedition of four ships carrying 170 landsmen, and the other materials for a projected settlement at the mouth of the Mississippi. Through some error in the navigation, the landing was made three hundred miles to the westward of the intended point. In the pestilential spot to which they had been lured by golden dreams, almost all manner of calamities combined to fall upon them; and not the least was the loss of their able and indefatigable chief, who was murdered by a party with which he was making his way towards the northern French settlements, to obtain succours for his ill-fated colony, which was entirely broken up in a short time afterwards. But it was not long before the experiment was renewed by another set of adventurers, who entered the Mississippi in 1699, and took their position on the extremity of a territory thenceforward distinguished, formally, by the denomination of Louisiana, given it by Hennepin nineteen years before. This colony was destined to live-though no one would have anticipated this fortune from its temperament and early proceedings. It was composed of two descriptions of persons; "the first unaccustomed to manual labour, but possessing, enterprise, and expecting to gather fortunes from the mines and Indian trade; the second, and much the most numerous, poor and idle, and expecting to subsist on the bounty of government, rather than VOL. III. New Series.

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