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 {158} 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. [Sidenote: _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. [Footnote 7: Denonville's fort, referred to above, p 111, was a later structure.] [Sidenote: _The voyage of the 'Griffin' to Michillimackinac._] [Sidenote: _Loss of the ship._] On August 7, 1679, the _Griffin_ started on her voyage up Lake Erie. On the tenth--the feast of Sainte Claire--she had passed up the Detroit river and was in Lake St. Clair. Against the strong current of the St. Clair river, she found her way into Lake Huron, and, buffeted by storm and wind, reached in the course of the same month the mission of St. Ignace at Michillimackinac. Of the advanced party of traders sent there in the previous year, some had deserted; others, who remained true, were found at Green Bay with a rich store of furs; and on the eighteenth of September La Salle parted with his vessel, sending her to carry back the furs to the portage at Niagara. He never saw the ship again, and her fate was never known. Foundering, it would seem, in Lake Michigan, she left her owner to wait in vain for her return, in want of food, in want of stores for his onward march, with followers whom he could not trust, with Indian tribes to master or appease, with winter making the way harder and the wilderness more drear. {159} [Sidenote: _La Salle builds a fort at the end of Lake Michigan._] [Sidenote: _He descends the Illinois river._]