Note 4 — Historical Introduction.

It must be remembered that the voyage of the priest Marquette, and the fur-trader Joliet, in 1673, had reached the Mississippi, down which they sailed as far as the mouth of the Arkansas. At that point, thinking that they had sufficiently established the fact that the waters of the Mississippi discharged, not into the Gulf of California, but into the Gulf of Mexico (although they were then really only within seven hundred miles of its mouth) they returned to Canada and so reported.