First French Foot-Prints Beyond the Lakes. 95 



Year after year La Salle risked life and lost fortune laboring 

 to build a forty ton vessel for descending the Mississippi. After 

 heart-breaking failures he trusted himself to a native canoe, and 

 thanks to this new departure, easily gained the goal of his ambi- 

 tion. Had he found the great river hedged up by Niagaras — as 

 was reported by natives — his progress would not have been 

 stopped. He could have carried his boat till his boat could carry 

 him. 



A man who riding for the first time in a cab and asked where 

 hie was going answered, " To Glory ! " spoke out the exultation 

 which thrilled every French adventurer with his face set toward 

 the western unknown, his hands skilled in paddling a bark canoe 

 and himself encumbered with no more baggage than the ship- 

 wrecked rascal who said he had lost everything except his 

 character. 



Throughout the orient the name of doctor is a sesame open. 

 When Moslems overhear a traveler addressed as doctor they unbar 

 for him even their harems, no matter how often he tells them that 

 it is only in law or divinity or farriery, that he is a doctor. 



Among savages everywhere every civilized man passes in spite 

 of himself for a physician. Relying on this reputation the early 

 French ventured into the infinite west. Nor was their quackery 

 less successful than that of an English monarch touching for the 

 king's evil when 



" Strangely visited people 

 All swollen and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye, 

 The mere despair of surgery, he cures." 



When Hennepin was a captive among the Sioux, whose blood 

 had before been drawn only by the sucking mouths of medicine 

 men, he bled their asthmatics, he treated other patients with a 

 confection of hyacinth (a sort of squills) and desperate cases with 

 orvietum, a theriac compounded of three score and four drugs. 

 The more ingredients the more certain, as men thought, the cure, 

 as the more bullets in a volley the more surely some of them will 

 hit. A decade earlier, Perrot having dosed a surfeited glutton 

 with the same theriac, had succeeded as well as the druggist, who, 

 when vox populi was prescribed, .gave nux vomica. The next 



