Daniel Spurr - River of Forgotten Days: A Journey Down the Mississippi in Search of La Salle

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Contents

For Andra

Thanks to all who lent a hand along the trail:

Gene Correll, who first showed me the pleasures of cruising in small boats, and who brought me across Lake Michigan to the Ports des Morts, where this quest for La Salle was born.

Don Helger of Dons Service, and Dan and Kathleen at A&D Trailers, both in Tiverton, Rhode Island, who busted their butts getting Pearl ready for the Mississippi.

Dale Nouse, the kind of friend one hopes for but seldom finds, who encouraged this project, helped set it up, and gave wise advice about the manuscript.

My son, Stephen, and daughter, Adriana, for sharing in the adventure; without them it would have meant less.

Lee Politsch, who keeps the mystery alive, and for opening to me his archives, as well as his home.

Barto Arnold, for having me aboard Anomaly.

Mel Guidrick of Lafitte, Louisiana, last stop on the Barataria Waterway, who provided assistance and a place to rest when there was none left.

Stanton Murray, for taking care of us and our equipment in New Orleans.

Robert Weddle, learned man, who graciously reviewed and corrected the manuscript.

All the good people along the river who stopped to transport us and our fuel jugs.

Dan Spurr

Newport, Rhode Island

Nothing exists but atoms and the voidso wrote Democritus. And it is void that underlies the Eastern teachingsnot emptiness or absence, but the Uncreated that preceded all creation, the beginningless potential of all things.

Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

How it came upon me is not quite clear. But take ahold it did, many years ago, when every Friday at five I fled the fields of maize surrounding my southern Michigan home for the wilderness of Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior. It was the unending stands of pine and fir, the granite and quartz of the Laurentian Shield that kept me coming back. That and the emptiness. What I wanted was a sense of the land before the roads and railways, way back, when the whites were first coming up the rivers looking for fur, copper, and the Northwest Passage.

My earliest recollection of Longfellows shining Big-Sea-Water was on a now forgotten shore of Lake Michigan. That great oblong sweet-water sea that the French voyageurs called Lac des Illinois and the Indians Machihiganing. Age six. Family vacation. There was no sand on this particular stretch. Rather, the beach was covered with smooth rocks the size of baseballs and dinosaur eggs. Sometimes you could find a Petoskey stone. The gift shops sold them guised as paperweights and good-luck charms. Silvery driftwood littered the glacis between the trees and the water. The washed-up pieces were polished by the surf to a slippery smoothness, the points of the splinters and roots rounded over like amputated fingers. It gave them a melted, artistic look. Found objects. Gift shops sold these, too. Mother saw one she liked and gave it to Father, who took it home and from it made a lamp. Its triangular shape resembled a large angelfish, the fishs eye the hole where a knot had fallen out. A quiet-spoken forester, Father had an unusual affinity for wood. I remember him drilling into the lighter heartwood and inserting a brass pipe to route the electrical cord. For years the lamp sat on an end table in the living room. No one knows where the fish lamp is now. Somewhere along the way it was tossed or given away, disappeared from the family consciousness. All but mine.

The ocean, when I first stood at its edge, had a different effect than the lake. There was the same endless expanse, the same rhythmic succession of waves falling over themselves to my feet, but it smelled of rotting seaweed and tasted of saltthe primordial solution, the stuff of life, its ratio of salt to water the same as that of the fluid that fills the human body.

When I learned to sail, I dreamed of crossing oceans in small boats. I lamented that there were no longer uncharted rivers or lands to discover. There was only the Uncreated.

The seven oceans, I figured, were the last frontier. But I lived in the Midwest and for many years the great freshwater lakes were my surrogate seas. Still, I was disappointed that there were no sharks, giant squids, whales, anemones, lionfish, or starfish. Just dead alewives, a few sturgeon and pike, and restocked coho salmon. The lakes seemed second-rate, so I looked for reasons to elevate these inland seas, to make them wondrous, more dangerous, more worthy of my own life.

Witness: When a storm sweeps down from Canada, the waters turn treacherous. Ships go down. The Edmund Fitzgerald, its bow on one wave and stern on another, folded in the middle and sank to the bottom of Whitefish Bay in Lake Superior, Hiawathas Gitche Gumee.

Always the lakes are cold. On a changeable day in the last century, a mailman took the morning ferry from Wisconsins Bruce Peninsula to Washington Island and returned that evening by horse and sleigh.

To transform the lakes, the trick, for me, was to go back in time, peel away the layers of civilization, and create wilderness in my own imagination. What I called pre-America, a place of lakes and rivers and virgin forests where there were no marinas, no navigation buoys, no 911 emergency telephone numbers, no 7-Elevens, nothing save clear water and, all around it, an endless field of green treetops.

* * *

From Giovanni Cabotos (John Cabots) reconnaissance of the East Coast in 1497 and extending 409 years to Roald Amundsens first navigation by a European of the Northwest Passage, the New World was to the great world powers an obstacle between oceans.

The Spanish, well established in Mexico, had during the sixteenth century reconnoitered Florida and much of the South: Juan, Ponce de Len, who in 1513 was the first to land on the prominent peninsula, and later Alonso Alvarez de Pineda, Pnfilo de Narvez, and Hernando de Soto, who in 1541 was the first European to cross the Mississippi above its mouth and whose charts and accounts of the river would stand unchanged for 141 years. The English held the East Coast. They came first to Roanoke Island, Virginia, where the first European in America was born: Virginia Dare, who later disappeared with all the other inhabitants. No trace ever found. In 1607 Captain John Smith led a group to Jamestown, Virginia, and later, of course, in 1620, the Pilgrims sailed into Plymouth, Massachusetts, spreading themselves coastwise north and south. In 1524 the Italian navigator Giovanni da Verrazano saw from his ship New York harbor; in 1609 Henry Hudson sailed up the river that now bears his name; and in 1624 the merchant Dutch settled on the island of Manhattan. The French, too, were competitors in the transatlantic race to explore the New World: Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence River in 1534, and in 1562 Jean Ribault settled at Port Royal, just north of St. Augustine, Florida. Samuel de Champlain began his exploration of Canada in 1603 and became lieutenant governor in 1612. A year later it was he who, for the historical record, was the first white to behold the great water-filled cavities of the Great Lakes, gouged from the earth ten thousand years earlier by fingers of ice clawing the northward retreat. And it was the coureurs de bois and voyageursback country trapperswho first heard of and became intrigued by Native American stories of the Mississippi. But where it began, where it flowed, and where it entered, no white knew. (I have used white as a reminder that the New Worlds discovery was a European context; the Amerinds, who had lived here since the Pleistocene geologic era, knew all along where the Mississippi discharged itself.)