Excerpt from History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. 1 of 3: To the Sources of the Missouri, Across the Rocky Mountains, Down the Columbia River to the Pacific in 1804-6 Though Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence as early as 1534, New France was not founded until the coming in 1603 of Champlain, perhaps the noblest type in the whole impressive series of colonizers that went forth into the world under the banner of the lilies. In resource and courage he was matchless: in imagination he conceived such projects as occupying America with a French empire and even connecting the Pacific with the Atlantic by an Isthmian canal. In temper he seems to have been, moreover, unlike his class in general, sweet and disposed to cooperation. If properly sustained, as has been said, he would have colonized from Quebec to Florida, or westward from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi. After thirty years of heroic striving, how ever, he died in his little fortress at Quebec, the great wilder ness about him as yet scarcely touched by any impress, his fine energy throughout his life crippled and deadened by want of sympathy and support from home. When his life went out it was like the extinction of a torch; and for a See W. Frewen Lord's Lost Empires of the Modern World on this tapic. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.