AMERICAN FRESH WATERS
And my pearls are pure as thy own fair neck, With whose radiant light they vie.
Whittier, The Vaudois Teacher.
The most
recently developed pearl fisheries are within the limits of the United
States, in the rivers and fresh-water lakes, and especially those in
the Mississippi Valley. As an important industrial enterprise, these
fisheries .are less than two decades old, yet they are very productive,
yielding annually above half a million dollars' worth of pearls, many
of which compare favorably in quality with those from oriental seas.
The
prehistoric mounds in the Mississippi Valley present evidence of the
estimation in which pearls were held by a race of men who passed away
ages before America was first visited by Europeans. In some of these
mounds, erected by a long-forgotten race, pearls have been found not
only in hundreds and in thousands, but by gallons and even by bushels.
Some of these equal three quarters of an inch in diameter, and in
quantity exceed the richest individual collections of the present day.
Damaged and partly decomposed by heat and through centuries of burial,
they have lost their beauty, and are of value only to the archaeologist
and to indicate the quantity of pearly treasures possessed by these
early people.
Owing
to the great wealth of pearls which had been uncovered on the Spanish
Main, at Panama, and in the Gulf of California, Eldorado explorers, in
the sixteenth century, were particularly eager in searching for them
within the present limits of the United States ; in the reports of
their wanderings, much space is given to these gems, and these reports
aided largely in inducing and encouraging other expeditions. Some of
these accounts read like the marvelous stories of Sindbad the Sailor,
quantities of pearls—hundreds of pounds in some instances—being secured
by the exchange of trinkets and by more questionable means. It would be
easy to bring together numerous accounts of apparently reliable
authorities to show that in the sixteenth century pearls were obtained
here in far greater quantities than were ever known in any other part
of the world; but this conclusion seems not wholly correct.
The unfortunate wanderings of Hernando de Soto from 1539 to
