What concerns us here are the two volumes already in print. Nearly all the documents in the first of these have been used as material for the history of La Salle in the book to which we have before alluded, the "Discovery of the Great West," and this is also the case with a great part of those in the second volume; but the remainder, including the letters of La Salle, have never been used by any historical writer. We propose to give here some glimpses of the letters and of their author, as he appears painted, consciously or unconsciously, by his own hand.

This correspondence is addressed to persons interested, in one way or another, in La Salle's enterprises, and is in fact his account of what he was doing, rendered to associates who in some cases were personal friends. Most of the letters were written by the camp-fire, among Indians and bushrangers. They are what might be expected under the circumstances, hasty, rather crude in style, and not very consecutive; but bearing everywhere the stamp of the man and of his surroundings. The beginning of the first letter is lost, but, fragment as it is, it covers sixty pages. "I have written it," says La Salle, "at twenty different times and at twenty different places, and am more than a hundred and fifty leagues from where I began it. I close it now more from want of paper than of matter, for I have still a hundred things to tell you, but I must send off this canoe if I want my letter to reach you. It will not be easy for it to reach Quebec before the vessels sail, having more than three hundred leagues to make within a month." The canoe, in fact, seems not to have arrived in time, for the letter was more than a year in reaching France. Others were two years on the way, while some were lost altogether, by accident or design.

La Salle had embarked on an enterprise that raised all Canada against him, except a few individuals, fortunately including the governor, whom he had succeeded in enlisting on his side, and who had interests in common with him. His plans involved a virtual monopoly of the valley of the Mississippi, which he meant to occupy by fortified posts, and commercial and industrial colonies; and to that end the king had given him the exclusive privileges without which he could not have gained the needful co-operation. Money he must have, and in abundance; and he could have it only by the possession of a monopoly of which the real or apparent value would tempt capital. This advantage cost him a heavy VOL. CXXV. NO. 259.

28.

price, for it drew upon him the hatred of the Canadian merchants. The Jesuits were no less hostile to him. They aimed at making the valley of the Mississippi the seat of a vast mission, the counterpart of their mission of Paraguay. The Indians were to be gathered into "reductions" under the government of the fathers. It was a scheme of ecclesiastical settlement and trade opposed to the secular settlement and trade of La Salle. The two plans were inconsistent each with the other, and the brotherhood of Loyola did their best to thwart their rival. From these two causes rose most of the difficulties which made the life of La Salle one long battle with adversity.

Other difficulties rose out of himself. He was not at heart a merchant. His ambition was of another stamp, and if he was deeply involved in enterprises of trade it was mainly because without them he could not accomplish his cherished purposes. Wealth alone had not power to content him. He aimed at achievement and thirsted after greatness. The Fleur-de-lis flourishing in the wilderness was to tell his name to posterity; but the means by which he must pursue his objects were not very congenial to him, nor was he well suited to them. Considered only as a merchant, he dared too much and did not always dare with judgment. His heroic nature had other failings for which he was nowise answerable, but which deplorably lessened his chances of success. will appear in the sequel.

These

When he wrote the letter of which we have given a short extract, he had finished the first stage of his great enterprise and reached a disastrous failure, due far more to his ill-wishers and his ill-fortune than to any fault of his own. He had obtained his patent from the king, raised money, hired men, established a post at Niagara, launched a vessel called the Griffin on Lake Erie, reached the portage of Chicago, descended the Illinois, built Fort Crèvecœur near the site of Peoria, and placed another vessel on the stocks in which to sail down to the unknown mouth of the Mississippi, and open a route for trade through the Gulf of Mexico. It was his purpose to plant a colony on the fertile plains of the Illinois, and connect it with the rest of the world by this new communication, of the practicability of which he had convinced himself by previous explorations. Here was an undeveloped world, teeming with latent wealth, and the home, it might be,

of future millions of Frenchmen. He, La Salle, would give it to civilization and to France.

Success hung for the present on one point, the safety of his vessel, the Griffin, which he had sent back to Niagara with a load of furs to satisfy his creditors and his partners, and which was to have returned immediately to Chicago with supplies that were absolutely necessary to him. Her time had long since passed, and she had not come. He waited till the last hope of her safety was almost dead; his men were deserting him, and if the enterprise was to continue there remained but one resource. This was to leave Fort Crèvecœur in charge of his lieutenant, Tonty, make his way on foot through a thousand miles of wilderness to his depot of Fort Frontenac, and return to the Illinois with the needed. succors. "Therefore," he writes to his correspondent, "though the approach of spring and the thaws greatly increased the difficulty of the way, which was interrupted by rivers and marshes, to say nothing of the length of the journey, and the danger of meeting Indians of four or five nations through whose country we must pass, and also an army of Iroquois, who we knew were coming by the route we must take, and who, meeting us at night, would not fail to attack us; of suffering continual hunger; sleeping on the ground often without food; marching by day and keeping watch by night; carrying a load of baggage, such as blankets, clothing, kettle, axe, gun, lead, powder, and skins to make moccasons; sometimes pushing through thickets, sometimes climbing over rocks covered with ice and snow, sometimes marching whole days. through swamps where the water was waist-deep and even more, at a season when the snow was not entirely melted,— all this did not prevent me from resolving to go afoot to Fort Frontenac, to learn news of my vessel and bring back the supplies we wanted." There is nothing, perhaps, in any of his letters so much like selfpraise as this. He wrote it when the experience of that astonishing journey was fresh on his mind and on his frame. "It was the most arduous march ever made by Frenchmen in America," says the compiler of the official report. When, after sixty-five days of toil and misery, La Salle and the three men with him reached Niagara, all but he were overcome by exhaustion and disease. The following, from his own pen, will serve as an example of the ordeal they had passed:

"At noon on the 25th [March] we resumed our walk through the woods, which were so matted with thorns and brambles that in two days and a half our clothes were torn to tatters and our faces so scratched and bloody that we hardly knew each other. On the 28th the woods were more open, and we began to fare better, meeting a good quantity of game, such as deer, bears, and turkeys, which we had not found before, so that we had often travelled from morning till night without breakfast." They were now crossing the southern part of Michigan. Indians were following them, and, to throw them off the track, they set fire to the dry grass of the meadows through which they passed to obliterate the marks of their trail. "We did this every night, which answered very well as long as we found open fields; but on the 30th we got into great marshes flooded by the thaws, and were forced to wade through them in mud and water, so that our tracks were seen by a band of Maskontins who were out after Iroquois. They followed us through the marshes during the three days we were crossing them, but we made no fire at night, merely taking off our soaked clothes, and wrapping ourselves in our blankets on some dry knoll, where we slept. But, as there was an uncommonly sharp frost on the night of the 2d of April, and as our clothes, which were completely saturated, were stiff as sticks in the morning, we could not put them on without making a fire to thaw them. This betrayed us to the Indians, who were encamped across the marsh. They ran towards us with loud cries, but were stopped half-way by a watercourse, which they could not get over, as the ice was not strong enough. We went towards them within gunshot, and, whether our firearms frightened them, or whether they thought there were more of us than there really were, or whether, in fact, they meant us no harm, they called out in the Illinois language that they had taken us for Iroquois, but now saw that we were brothers; whereupon they went off as they came, and we kept on our way till the 4th, when two of my men fell sick and could not travel." They were now on the banks of the river Huron, and a canoe was made for the invalids.

This is but one among a hundred examples of the energy of a man who, a recluse in early life, and nurtured among books, stood amid a hardy generation without an equal in moral and physical endurance. His mettle was tried to the utmost. A dismal greet

ing awaited him at the end of his journey. His vessel, the Griffin, was lost with all her freight, and news of disaster after disaster fell upon him like an avalanche. His agents had plundered him, his creditors had seized his property, a band of laborers on the way to join him had been persuaded to desert, some of his canoes, richly laden with furs, had been lost in the rapids of the St. Lawrence, and a ship from France, freighted with his goods to the value of twentytwo thousand livres, had been totally wrecked. Yet every difficulty had given way before him; he had succeeded in collecting men, canoes, and supplies, and was on the point of hastening back as he had come, for the relief of Tonty and the men left with him on the Illinois, when two Canadians, despatched by that officer, brought him tidings worse than all the rest. Tonty wrote that nearly all his men had deserted, after destroying Fort Crèvecœur, plundering the magazine, and throwing into the river all the arms, goods, and stores that they could not carry off.

La Salle lost no time in lamentation. He presently learned that the deserters had passed Niagara, and were on the way to Fort Frontenac, where he then was, intending to kill him wherever they might find him, as the surest way to escape punishment. He did not wait their approach, but went to meet them with such men as he had, discovered them on Lake Ontario, and captured all but two, who made fight and were shot by his followers. He next bent all his thoughts to succoring Tonty and the three or four faithful men who remained with him at the Illinois. A deep anxiety possessed him. For some time past a rumor had been abroad that the Iroquois, encouraged, as he believed by his enemies, were preparing a grand inroad into the valley of the Illinois which threatened to involve in a common destruction the tribes of that quarter and the incipient colony of La Salle. The danger was but too real. He was but half-way to his destination when a host of Iroquois warriors fell upon Tonty and his Indian allies, and filled the valley of the Illinois with carnage and devastation. When, after a long and weary journey, La Salle with his followers reached the great town of the Illinois, where he hoped to find his lieutenant, he saw a ghastly scene. "On the 1st of December," he says, "we arrived near evening at the town, and found nothing but ashes and the relics of Iroquois fury. Everything was destroyed, and nothing remained but the stumps of burnt lodge-poles, which showed what had been