THE YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK 71 



In the year 1541, when De Soto, with a ro- 

 mantic band of adventurers, was seeking gold 

 and glory and the fountain of youth, he found 

 the Mississippi a few hundred miles above its 

 mouth, and made his grave beneath its floods. 

 La Salle, in 1682, after discovering the Ohio, 

 one of the largest and most beautiful branches of 

 the Mississippi, traced the latter to the sea from 

 the mouth of the Illinois, through adventures and 

 privations not easily realized now. About the 

 same time Joliet and Father Marquette reached 

 the " Father of Waters " by way of the Wiscon- 

 sin, but more than a century passed ere its high- 

 est sources in these mountains were seen. The 

 advancing stream of civilization has ever followed 

 its guidance toward the west, but none of the 

 thousand tribes of Indians living on its banks 

 could tell the explorer whence it came. From 

 those romantic De Soto and La Salle days to 

 these times of locomotives and tourists, how much 

 has the great river seen and done ! Great as it 

 now is, and still growing longer through the 

 ground of its delta and the basins of receding gla- 

 ciers at its head, it was immensely broader toward 

 the close of the glacial period, when the ice-man- 

 tle of the mountains was melting : then with its 

 three hundred thousand miles of branches out- 

 spread over the plains and valleys of the conti- 

 nent, laden with fertile mud, it made the biggest 

 and most generous bed of soil in the world. 



