the desert, thus tracing a line of march through southern Texas at least one degree of latitude below the New Mexican boundary.

Had the adventurous Spaniards ever trod the soil of eastern or southern New Mexico, they would have come in contact with immense herds of buffaloes. They saw the great quadruped several times during the first six or seven years of their adventurous career. Cabeza de Vaca states that it occasionally reached the Gulf coast in Florida-but so soon as they began to travel westward, the buffalo country remained always to the north of them, and at some distance.† Once across the river and in Chihuahua, they did not hear any more of the "hunch-backed cows." To leave the buffalo grounds steadily in the north while travelling to the west, meant striking across southern Texas exclusively, and to reach the Rio Grande at or below the mouth of the Pecos river.

Lastly, the narratives fairly teem with diffuse information about the inhabitants of the country. Unfortunately the names used in order to designate tribes and bands are such that we cannot determine anything from them. Out of eigh

teen or twenty names of "languages," not one can be identified as yet.§ It is different, however, with the picture presented of the degree of culture and mode of life. This picture shows roving tribes without fixed abode, subsisting from fishing along the coast at certain periods of the year, scattering towards the interior during the seasons when certain wild fruits ripened. The weapons of these natives consisted of bows and of arrows tipped with fish bones, shell fragments, and with flint brought from the interior by exchange. Further westward the mode of life became less transitory, and as they approached the Rio Grande, while the population was more numerous, their excursions seemed to be confined to buffalo ranges, which invariably lay further north.|| Beyond Texas in Chihuahua, Indians were as wild as east of it. It was only among the "high mountains," which I have identified as the "Sierra Madre," that tribes were found who enjoyed more permanent abodes.

There, too, the Spaniards met with the first fields of maize or Indian corn,¶ neither in Louisiana nor in Texas, nor in Chihuahua, had they found any tribe which cultivated that great American staple. Beans were raised on the Rio Grande, otherwise vegetable food con

? Compare Naufragios' (Chap. xxvi).
Naufragios,' [Chap. xxx, xxxi].

sisted of wild fruits, leaves and roots exclusively.*

Neither did the inhabitants of the country use or make any pottery. Gourds supplied the want of ceramic utensils.† Had, now, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions touched any part of New Mexico, they could not have failed to meet corn-tilling and pottery-making aborigines, or to hear of them in a very definite manner,as also of the permanent abodes of the so-called Pueblos. ing of the sort is told or intimated. central Texas, between the Brazos and Colorado, a copper-rattle was given to them which, the Indians claimed, had been brought from the west, together with some cotton cloth. The most southerly villages of New Mexican natives existed in the sixteenth century about San Marcial,§ at least three hun

NothIn

dred and fifty miles north-northwest of Presidio del Norte. Intercourse was difficult and slow; the tribes of central Texas seldom, if ever, came in contact with the Pueblos, and then only on buffalo hunts. It is not surprising, therefore, that the travelers heard nothing of countries and people so far distant, and it is certain that they never set their foot on New Mexican soil, as far as the territory is understood to extend at the present time.

The first houses of earth or sod which they saw were those in the Sierra Madre of Chihuahua. The locality or region is established by the statement that the people of these villages had parrot's feathers in such quantities that they traded them off further north in exchange for turquoises.|| The green parrot is no inhabitant of either New Mexico or Arizona. It dwells in the pine forests of the Sierra Madre; therefore south of the Mexican boundary. The Indians who inhabited these buildings belonged, evidently, to the Jovas, a linguistical branch of the Pimas of Sonora. Like their congeners they had houses of sod or of large, coarse "adobes," as an exception, the rule being for them to live in huts of canes and palm leaves.** Such is also the

609 and 610.] 'Naufragios' [Chap. XXXI.] Oviedo [pp.

¶Orozco y Berra Geografia de Lenguas [. 345.]

† Compare Ribas 'Historia de los Triumphos etc.,' [Lib. VI, Chap. vii, p. 369-372; Chap. xviii, p. 391; Chap. ii, pp. 360; Part II, Lib. VIII, Chap. ii, p. 471.] P. Francisco Xavier Alegre Historia de la Compania de Jesus en Nueva Espana' [edited by Bustamante in 1841. Vol. I, Lib. III, p. 231-235.]

description furnished by Cabeza de Vaca and his friends. Their joint narrative says: "And those Indians had a few small houses of earth, made of sod, with their flat roofs."* This style of architecture is widely different from the compact, many-storied, Pueblo

villages.

The people of these settlements informed Cabeza de Vaca that the parrot plumes which they owned were traded by them with tribes who, in the north, lived among high mountains.† This may be an allusion to the New Mexican village Indians, although it is not absolutely certain. Large houses of clay (and rubble) were inhabited by the "Opatas" also, in the northern. Sierra Madre, and the many-storied

27 66

casa grande," casa blanca," on the the banks of the Gila river in Arizona were formerly Pima villages.‡

Even if the information thus picked up and transmitted by Cabeza de Vaca should relate to New Mexico, it does not entitle him to the credit of being the discoverer of that country. Neither was his trip necessary for directing the attention of the Spaniards to the north. But it increased their desire to penetrate in that direction, and furnished a daring, although injudicious guide, in the person of the negro Estévanico, to the subsequent discoverer of New Mexico and of the "Pueblo " Indians-Fray Marcos of Nizza.

AD. F. BANDELIER.

WHEN the school-boy learns in his geography lesson that Lake Itasca is the source of the monarch of North American rivers, he thinks, if at all, of the wild forests, wild beasts and wild men who abound in that mysterious because little known region of Minnesota; but it never occurrs to him to inquire whence came the name of the little lake, like a speck on his map, which gives birth to the watery serpent whose sinuous curves wind down through the centre of the continent three thousand

*Oviedo [p. 609.]

'Naufragios,' Chap. xxxi, p. 543.

two hundred miles. Yet, if he but chose to ask the question, there lives in Minnesota a man who could answer it, since he was present at the lake's christening. This man is the Rev. W. T. Boutwell, who is now eighty-three years old, and the only survivor of the first American expedition sent to explore the headquarters of the Mississippi, and to reconcile the northwestern Indians to the American government. He gives the following account of the

Compare my report in the Fifth Annual Report of the Archæological Institute of America,' pp. 80, 81,

In 1831 Mr. Boutwell was sent by the American board of missions to Mackinaw, Michigan, then the headquarters of the American Fur company. The chief of the Indian missions at Mackinaw, Rev. William Ferry (father of exSenator Ferry), set him first at learning the Chippewa language, which occupied his time for a year.

En

Though England conceded the right of the United States to the northwestern country in 1816, it was several years before the English hunters and trappers were driven out and the Americans put in possession of the territory. couraged by their old English friends, the Indians made frequent trips across the border into British America, where hatred of the Americans was incited by the wily Britisher, and the bonds of ancient friendship cemented by liberal presents of tobacco, trinkets, British flags, etc. The natural result was the frequent massacre of American traders and trappers by the savages. In 1832 the American government decided to send an expedition among the Indians, with presents and medals and flags, to convince them of the good intentions of their new great father, and win their friendship and good will.

Accordingly, Henry R. Schoolcraft, the general Indian agent at Sault Ste. Marie, with Mr. Boutwell, a physician, an interpreter, and a squad of soldiers under Lieutenant Allen, thirty men all told, supplied with all necessaries, started out in row boats. They coasted along the southern shore of Lake Su

of the lake, ascended the St. Louis river about seventy-five miles, thence up Savan river to its source in a tamarac swamp. A short portage took them over the divide and brought them to a small stream, down which they floated to the Mississippi. They then rowed up the Father of Waters to Cass lake, until then supposed to be the Mississippi's source.

After spending some days exchanging American medals and flags for like articles given by British hands, and cultivating friendship with the red men, they learned from the Indians that Cass lake was not the source of the Mississippi. Under the guidance of a chief and a large party of the tribe, the Americans started up the river in canoes in search of the true source. When they reached Itasca five of the party-Schoolcraft, Boutwell, Allen, Houghton and the interpreter-canoed by Indians, made a tour of the lake and satisfied themselves that it had no inlet and no other outlet than that by which they came.

They afterward landed upon an island, planted an American flag, and spent some time in discussing a name for the newly discovered lake, the Indian appellation being too much of a jawbreaker for the civilized tongue to successfully surround. Being satisfied this lake was the real source of the Mississippi, as the Indians claimed, Schoolcraft asked Boutwell if he knew of any word which would mean "the true head of the river." Boutwell answered that he knew of no one word with the required meaning, but the two Latin

words, veritas, “true," and caput, "head,” would express the desired meaning. The two words were written upon a piece of paper, but made too long a name; so Schoolcraft erased the first syllable of the first word and the last syllable of the second word, and joined the remaining syllables, Ver-Itasca-put. The lake was then fomally named "Itasca," and by that name referred to in the report to the government.

Mr. Boutwell considers it a great thing to relate that as they passed out of the lake he landed from his canoe and at one bound jumped across the mighty Mississippi, at that place about twelve feet wide and three or four feet deep.

The exploring party finished their work among the Indians, then started for home. They descended the Mississippi past the sites of the great cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, then occupied only by a few head of government cattle belonging to Fort Snelling, and stopped for a short consultation at Kaposha, a Sioux village a few miles below where St. Paul now is. They then descended to the mouth of the St. Croix, went up the latter river past the present site of Stillwater to its source, made a portage of a few miles to Burnt Wood river, thence to Lake Superior, returning as they came to headquarters at the "Soo."

HERBERT L. BAKER.

The result of this insult to the best Whig sentiment of the north, was a great diversion of strength, from the ranks of the Whigs, to those of the Freesoil Democrats, who nominated Hale and Julian upon their national ticket and, in Michigan, placed a full ticket in the field, with Isaac P. Christiancy at its head. The Democrats renominated Robert McClelland, one of their best men, and second in strength only to General Cass.

The canvass preceding the election was one of unprecedented activity and thoroughness. Mr. Chandler took the stump early in September and spoke

almost nightly until the close of the week preceding the election. He thus visited every important place in the state, and everywhere made a deep impression by the force, practical sense and evident sincerity of his utterances. In his campaign speeches he ranged himself definitely as the friend of protection and of internal improvements, and discussed national affairs practically and unsensationally, from the standpoint of a business man.

His vigorous canvass aroused the Democrats to their utmost endeavor, and led General Cass to take the stump, lest his own state should be last. The re