[2] Get Rid of Him, by exposing him to be scalped among hostile Indians.
[3] Sioux, properly Dacotahs, may be nominally divided in two great bodies by the Mississippi River. Those living on the east side were Eastern Sioux, those on the west, Western Sioux. Their country reached from the westernmost tributaries of the Mississippi to Lake Superior. In power, they were to the West what the Iroquois were to the East—the scourge of weaker nations. The Sioux ceded their lands east of the Mississippi to the United States, in 1837, living on the St. Peter's till the massacres of 1862-63 drove them thence.
[4] St. Paul, nine miles below the Falls of St. Anthony, capital city of Minnesota, settled about 1840; Benjamin Gervais, the first settler.
[5] Falls of St. Anthony. St. Anthony of Padua was Hennepin's patron saint. The Sioux were in the habit of hanging buffalo-robes on the trees as offerings to the spirit of the waters. Minneapolis is the growth of the water-power of these falls, having increased from 2,564 in 1860, to 46,000 in 1880.
[6] Lake Pepin, a broadening of the Mississippi, about twenty-five miles long. There is a pretty Indian legend connected with Maiden's Rock in the lake, told in Mrs. Eastman's Legends of the Sioux.
[7] La Salle asserts that the Jesuits told the men he had engaged to do this that the friar had been killed, so preventing them from going.
[8] The Sioux also. Recall the fact stated earlier, that Marquette fell in with the Sioux at or about Green Bay.
THE LOST COLONY: ST. LOUIS OF TEXAS.
Thus, in 1682, La Salle had secured an empire for France, and at last found a legitimate field for his own ambition. His Louisiana comprised every thing between the Alleghanies and Rio Grande, the Gulf of Mexico and Hudson's Bay. Upon opening the maps of the time we find the English crowded into the comparatively narrow limits extending from the eastern slopes of the Appalachian range to the sea, the Spaniards occupying those between the Rio Grande and Gulf of California, while the whole great heart of the continent, including portions of Carolina and Florida, with its magnificent system of waterways, is covered by the names New France and Louisiana.
But La Salle himself, the man of large and luminous views, had now reached the high-water-mark of his achievements. The wave which owed its impetus to his active brain, expended its force with his life.