THE RED MEN OF IOWA.

At intervals the voyageurs,mooring their canoes at the shore, doubtless ascended to the summits of the bluffs to look abroad over landscapes new and strange. Westward they beheld boundless expanses of billowy prairie, clothed in its luxuriant mantle of dark green, sprinkled over with flowers of many brilliant hues. As the fleecy clouds of the summer day floated between the sun and earth their moving and dissolving shadows could be seen on the swells and slopes, presenting a scene more weird and beautiful than the most gorgeous art panorama. But the view was not all a monotonous expanse of prairie, for here and there sparkling brooks, or grand rivers, came down from far-away and unknown regions, through woody valleys, to pour their crystal tribute into the "Father of Rivers." What strange objects or beings existed beyond their natural vision they

But were there no human owners and occupants of the soil? The voyageurs have themselves recorded the answer. On or about the 21st of June, and, as they estimated, about sixty leagues below the mouth of the Wisconsin, at a place where they landed on the west bank of the river, they discovered in the sand the foot-prints of men. This was, so far as they have recorded, the first evidence of human occupancy they had observed since embarking upon the Mississippi, or as Marquette named it, the "Broad River of the Conception." Leaving their five companions in charge of the two canoes, Marquette and Joliet journeyed across the prairie in the direction the trail indicated, in search of the human habitation they knew could not be very distant. The two indomitable adventurers wearily and patiently pursued their course through the rank grass, interspersed with wild rosin, then in its full, golden, summer bloom, and with a thousand brilliant flowering plants of humbler growth. In the distance they caught glimpses of a forest, and at