“Joliet returned to Quebec to announce the discovery, of which the fame, through Talon, quickened the ambition of Colbert. The unaspiring Marquette remained to preach the gospel to the Miamis, who dwelt in the north of Illinois, round Chicago. Two years afterwards, sailing from Chicago to Mackinaw, he entered a little river in Michigan. Erecting an altar, he said mass according to the rites of the Catholic church, after which he begged the men who conducted his canoe to leave him alone for half an hour. At the end of that time they went to seek him, but he was no more. The good missionary had fallen asleep on the margin of the stream that bears his name. Near its mouth, the canoe-men dug his grave in the sand. Ever after, the forest rangers, if in danger on Lake Michigan, would invoke his name. The people of the West will build his monument.” A modern traveller[11] remarks, with great truth and beauty, of the Mississippi, that the history of its discovery has two epochs, and each a romance, the one as different to the other as day and night—the one a sun-bright idyll, the other a gloomy tragedy. The first belongs to the northern district, the second to the southern; the former has for its hero the mild pastor, Father Marquette, the other the Spanish soldier, Ferdinand de Soto. Joliet, returning from the West, stopped at Frontenac, now Kingston, an outpost on Lake Ontario, of which the young Robert Cavalier la Salle was governor. La Salle, himself of a bold and adventurous turn of mind, had occupied his solitary leisure in reading the voyages of Columbus and the adventures of De Soto, and a traveller such as Joliet would not fail of being welcome. Of a good family in France, and educated a Jesuit, though he had afterwards been absolved from his vows, he had come over to Canada in the year 1667, and enjoying the favour of Talon and Courcelles, had explored Lakes Ontario and Erie. In 1675—when, on the dissolution of the West India Company, New France had reverted to the crown, La Salle hastened to his native land and obtained from the monarch the grant of Fort Frontenac, on condition of maintaining the fortress. This grant gave him in fact the exclusive traffic with the Five Nations. La Salle’s settlement here occurred about the time of the war with King Philip in New England and Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia.