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. {168} 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. [Sidenote: _Extermination of the colony in Texas._] [Sidenote: _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. [Sidenote: _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 {169} 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. [Sidenote: _Colonization of Louisiana by Iberville._]