The brother escaped; so did one of the nephews, and Joutel, a gardener's son from Rouen—the most honest and capable of the band—who afterwards told the unvarnished tale. They companied for a while with the murderers, roaming among the Indians of the west, until one and another of the guilty men fell by each other's hands or strayed into savagery. In the end seven Frenchmen, with the help of Indian guides, reached the Arkansas river, found an outpost established there by Tonty, made their way thence to the Illinois, and so to Canada and France. On the Illinois and in Canada they concealed, from policy or fear, the fact of La Salle's death. In the dead man's name his brother, the coward priest, obtained from Tonty advances for his home journey; and it was not till after he was safe in Europe, in the autumn of 1688, that the tragedy came to light.
| Indifference in France as to La Salle's death. |
Few seemed to care. A man had gone, who by the age of forty-three had achieved great deeds, had dared and suffered much; but he was a man who had few friends and many enemies, and he served a Government in whose eyes failure was a crime, and to which gratitude was unknown. An order was given that, if the murderers reappeared in Canada, they should be arrested, and with that order the name of La Salle passed out of official ken.
| Extermination of the colony in Texas. Tonty's faithfulness. |
The Government made no attempt to relieve the hapless exiles in Texas. They were left to perish, just as, many years before, the Huguenot settlers in Florida had been abandoned and betrayed. Tonty alone was mindful of his friend. Already, in 1686, before La Salle had started on his last march, he had descended the Mississippi to its mouth, and had searched the coast in vain, hoping to bring succour and relief; and when, in the autumn of 1688, he knew the full truth, again he started, to save if possible the remnant of the expedition. He penetrated to the Red river and beyond, but could not reach the fort in Texas; and it was from Spanish sources that the fate of the last settlers was afterwards known. An expedition from Mexico, sent to root out the intruders, found the fort a desolate ruin. The Indians had been beforehand in the work of destruction, and had butchered or carried off the inmates, two or three of whom exchanged captivity among savages for Spanish prisons.
| Importance of La Salle's work. |
Such was the end of La Salle's last venture—misery, ruin, death, and, for the time, comparative oblivion. Yet his name lives in history and deserves to live, and his work was not all undone. We look back not merely on his hardihood and his sufferings. We see in him not only an explorer of the boldest type; but he stands out pre-eminently as the man, who, above all others, grasped the conception of a North American dominion, which should be from sea to sea—based on the great geographical factor in North America, its nearly continuous water communication—and in which the natives of North America should be banded together in war and peace, under the leadership of France. From the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, by river and lake, his vision was that Frenchmen and their native subjects should come and go, carrying from fort to fort, from settlement to settlement, the produce of forest and prairie, the wealth of the West.
It was a great conception, too great to be realized; but it harmonized with the genius of the French people. Their gift was to be ever moving, their strength was not to sit still. What success they won was on the lines that La Salle marked out. With all his failures, he knew the land and he knew his race.
| Colonization of Louisiana by Iberville. |
The eighteenth century had not ended before the colonization of Louisiana became more than a dream. Tonty continued to urge it. The English threatened to take it in hand; Spain was reasserting her claim to the ownership of the Gulf of Mexico; and, lest the French should be excluded altogether, Le Moyne d'Iberville, best of Canadian leaders, obtained permission to sail for the Mississippi. More skilful than La Salle, or better informed, he reached its mouth in March, 1699; but the first settlements were made to the east of the river, at Biloxi in the present State of Mississippi, and on Mobile Bay. It was not till the year 1718 that the city of New Orleans was first founded by Bienville, Iberville's brother, who at intervals governed Louisiana for many years. Bandied about from Crown to company, and from company to Crown, the prey of speculators, the scene, like Canada itself, of artificial settlement and regulated colonization, Louisiana made but slow progress. Yet in time it became a factor to be reckoned with in North American history, and to connect it with Canada was in the eighteenth century the aim of the rulers of New France.