OF IOWA | 27 |
scribed by the Indians as beautiful meadows covered with grass, and abounding in wild game. In the Indian language “Mis-sis” signifies meadow, and the word “sepe” a river; hence we have “Mississippi,” as some early French explorers wrote it, signifying “River of the Meadows.”
The French at first supposed that the “River of the Meadows” flowed toward the Pacific Ocean and would afford the long sought direct route to china and India. The people of western Europe had for nearly a hundred and fifty years been hoping to find a direct route by water across the new continent, and it was long believed that it would be reached through this “Great River,” often mentioned by explorers.
The Jesuit revelations given by Father Claude Dablon in 1607, in an account of the Illinois Indian, says:
It does not appear to have been suspected by any of the early French Explorers that this river, so often told of by the Indians, was part of the “Great River” discovered by De Soto more than one hundred and thirty years before.