When De Soto Stood On The Banks Of The Mississippi, It Was
Still Two Years Before Luther's Death; Eleven Years
Before the burning
of Servetus; thirty years before the St. Bartholomew slaughter; Rabelais
was not yet published; 'Don Quixote' was
Not yet written; Shakespeare
was not yet born; a hundred long years must still elapse before
Englishmen would hear the name of Oliver Cromwell.
Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable fact which
considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our country, and
gives her a most respectable outside-aspect of rustiness and antiquity.
De Soto merely glimpsed the river, then died and was buried in it by his
priests and soldiers. One would expect the priests and the soldiers to
multiply the river's dimensions by ten - the Spanish custom of the day -
and thus move other adventurers to go at once and explore it. On the
contrary, their narratives when they reached home, did not excite that
amount of curiosity. The Mississippi was left unvisited by whites during
a term of years which seems incredible in our energetic days. One may
'sense' the interval to his mind, after a fashion, by dividing it up in
this way: After De Soto glimpsed the river, a fraction short of a
quarter of a century elapsed, and then Shakespeare was born; lived a
trifle more than half a century, then died; and when he had been in his
grave considerably more than half a century, the SECOND white man saw
the Mississippi.
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