There were seventeen men who set out on foot, early in January, 1687, to travel from Fort St. Louis on the Gulf of Mexico to the other Fort St. Louis on the Illinois River—a journey of over a thousand miles. They knew no trails which they could follow, nor were there bridges on which to cross the rivers; and to a large extent they must gather their food as they went. They must sleep where night found them; and they must trust the Indians whose country they were crossing to treat them as friends and give them guidance upon the way, for as far as they knew there was no white man in all the distance between the two forts. Yet forth they went bravely—La Salle and his brother and two nephews (Moranget and the young Cavelier), Joutel, and Father Douay, Duhaut the elder and his man L’Archevêque, whom he had picked up at the isle of Santo Domingo, Liotot the surgeon and Hiens the buccaneer, a young boy named Pierre Talon whom La Salle planned to leave at the Cenis village to learn their language, and a half-dozen others.

Father Membré, full of grief, remained with Barbier and the party at the fort and saw the slender band of explorers start off across the plains, their five horses loaded with supplies for a long and arduous journey. It being winter in the Southland, rains came upon them frequently and swamps and swollen streams blocked their way. Sometimes for days they walked drearily along the wet banks of rivers, looking for a place to ford. Occasionally they used logs to cross upon, but finally they found the streams so wide that they stopped and made portable boats out of buffalo hides.

There was no lack of game; and the broad paths of the buffalo often served as trails. Time and again the party came across Indians, with whom La Salle almost invariably made friends. Sometimes he visited their hunting-camps and smoked with them the pipe of peace. At other times he called them into his own camp to smoke and eat, and then sent them away happy with presents. They came upon Indian villages with round huts like French ovens, and stopped to trade beads and hatchets for a horse or provisions or deer-hide for fresh moccasins, listening meantime to the tales of Indian wars or of the Spaniards from whom their horses first came. They crossed the rivers now known as the Colorado and the Brazos and drew near to the Trinity River.

Many were the adventures which Joutel and the Abbé related to Tonty at Fort St. Louis on the Illinois. Before they reached the Cenis village, they said, La Salle separated from them, but intended to follow them soon. He was in good health when he left them. Without their leader they had pushed on to the village of the Cenis, and from there they went with guides to the Arkansas towns.

It was the 24th of July, 1687, three years to a day since they had sailed out of the harbor of Rochelle, when they came at last to a village on the shore of the Arkansas and saw on the river bank a house built like the houses of Frenchmen and the blessed cross rising straight to the sky. Out of the house on the shore came running two white men to welcome them. They were Jean Couture and De Launay, two of the men whom Tonty had left there on his return from his trip to the mouth of the Mississippi the year before. At the village the Arkansas danced the calumet dance before the Abbé. Later Couture accompanied the five men as far as the village of the Kappas, from which place, with Arkansas guides and an Indian canoe, they had come up the Mississippi and the Illinois and reached Fort St. Louis in the month of September.

Such in brief was the tale that the two men—brother and companion of La Salle—told to Tonty on the high rock of Fort St. Louis. The Man with the Iron Hand listened to each word with intense feeling. Nearly ten years before he had cast his lot with La Salle. With him and for him he had literally hungered and suffered and bled. He had given what he had of worldly goods, and his time, his strength, his whole self he had thrown into the balance to uphold the plans of his chief. He knew him as few men did—he knew his faults as well as his great abilities—and he loved him. Often he had remonstrated with him over some actions or methods that lost him favor with his me............