It is a discovery book. If one should ask which is the most important river basin in the world, there is no doubt that the Mississippi would be named, with its million and a quarter square miles of area and its twenty-five or more billions of aggregated wealth. Favored in climate, soil, and navigable streams, and endowed with practically inexhaustible veins of coal, copper, iron, and silver, feeding the world with its hundreds of millions of bushels of corn and wheat, and clothing it by other millions of bales of cotton, it is hardly so astonishing that within 217 years from its discovery by Joliet this greatest of river basins should be the abiding-place of twenty-seven and a half millions of people. Speaking of Joliet, Bancroft wrote that his short voyage brought him immortality; but in the irony of fate his explorations have not even given his name a place in the last edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. In writing on American explorers, it seems most fitting that this series 10 of sketches should be headed by this Canadian, whose name is scarcely known by one in a thousand. That aught is obtainable concerning the details of his life is due to the investigations of Shea, which later were admirably summed up by Parkman.
