| He is given a royal patent. |
These conditions are worth special note. La Salle was prepared to assure to France one more link in the chain of rivers and lakes: he was prepared too to disarm trading jealousy by renouncing any plans for intercepting the existing fur trade. He asked in return for a free hand to the south-west, in the lands of the Ohio, the Illinois, and the Mississippi. The answer of the King, given in May, 1678, was permission 'to labour at the discovery of the western parts of New France ... through which to all appearance a way may be found to Mexico,'5 and for that purpose to build forts and enjoy possession of them as at Fort Frontenac. The concession was limited to five years; and, while a monopoly in buffalo skins was granted to the petitioner, he was prohibited, as he had contemplated, from trading with the tribes whose furs came down to Montreal.
5 Quoted by Parkman in his La Salle (11th ed.), p. 112.
| Henri de Tonty. Father Hennepin. |
Having secured this patent, La Salle raised funds in France for the furtherance of his enterprise; and in July, 1678, set sail from La Rochelle to Canada, taking with him an Italian officer, Tonty, who had been recommended to him by the Prince de Conti, and whose subsequent faithfulness to his leader became almost proverbial. A companion of a different kind joined him on his return to Canada, Father Hennepin, a Flemish friar, a brave and sturdy traveller, but a man of great personal vanity and convicted of telling more than travellers' tales. He published an account of his travels in La Salle's lifetime, and, after his death, put forth a new edition,6 claiming to have anticipated La Salle in descending the Mississippi to the sea. The story has been proved to be an absolute imposture, the more discreditable that it was an attempt to rob a dead man of honour dearly bought.
6 The first book, published at Paris in 1683, was entitled Description de la Louisiane nouvellement découverte. The second, published at Utrecht in 1697, was headed Nouvelle découverte d'un très grand pays situé dans l'Amérique.
| La Salle builds a fort at Niagara. |
On his return from France, La Salle dispatched a party of men in advance to Lake Michigan, to trade and to collect stores against his own arrival. He then set himself, taking Fort Frontenac as his basis, to plant a post at the mouth of the Niagara river below the falls; and, above the falls, to build a ship of some appreciable size for the navigation of the upper lakes. The plan was well thought out. He would hold both ends of Lake Ontario; and, the continuity of advance being broken by the falls of Niagara, he would have, above the falls, an armed vessel plying for merchandise between Niagara and the end of Lake Michigan, where again there should be another fort or factory to safeguard the portage to the waters of the Mississippi.
| Suspicions of the Senecas. |
It was specially necessary to hold both ends of Lake Ontario, for here was the land of the Senecas. Jealously and sullenly they watched the Frenchmen's work, through the winter of 1678-9, not wholly reassured by a visit from La Salle himself to the chief town of the tribe; but they attempted no armed opposition. Thus the beginning was made of the first Fort Niagara,7 on the eastern bank of the river, in the angle formed by its junction with Lake Ontario; while on the same side of the water, five miles above the falls, where a stream called the Cayuga creek enters the main river, a ship was built bearing the name and the emblem of the Griffin, the appropriate arms of truculent Count Frontenac.