One of the assassin band, he who served as a decoy, was a youth of sixteen named l'Archeveque, who later arrived in New Mexico, lived a highly respected life there, and was eventually killed at the Pawnee village with Villazur.[52] L'Archeveque, with four others from the dismembered La Salle expedition, three young men and a girl, were found among the Tejas, two years after La Salle's murder, by Alonzo de Leon, a Spaniard who came up into Texas from Coahuila, one of the northern provinces of Mexico. He ransomed all and sent them to Mexico. Three years later, 1692, the Spaniards organised a settlement at San Antonio, and henceforth the French and Spaniards began in a hostile way to encounter each other on these wide frontiers. Iberville, in 1699, started near the mouth of the Mississippi the first permanent French settlement, and the French then rapidly spread along that river and its branches, and when the eighteenth century was fairly under way they had explored the country immediately along the Mississippi and the regions between it and Montreal; they had pushed far out into the North-west, even to the banks of the Saskatchewan. Indeed, a Frenchman is said to have reached Hudson Bay in 1656. All through these regions were beaver, bison, deer, panthers, and numerous other fur-bearing animals. The trapping of these and trading for them with the natives formed the chief incentive of the Frenchmen, just as the search for imaginary mines and fabulous cities actuated the Spaniards. The pursuit of the fur business offered a life of wild freedom, particularly fascinating to many Frenchmen, who fraternised with the natives and were able peacefully to travel from tribe to tribe, exchanging European wares for furs and other property the Amerinds had. The Amerinds welcomed these pedlars, for they wanted the goods they brought; and numbers of them ranged the forests, finally being collectively called _Coureurs de Bois_. They have been described as a kind of outlaw, but they were not exactly that. Their lives, knowing no restriction but their own consciences, highly elastic like almost all the consciences of that time, and perhaps this, were not always models of propriety, but they were in general probably little worse than the throat-cutting gentlemen who composed a large part of the several samples of the European nations which were striving to murder each other, and incidentally the natives, for the purpose of acquiring sole possession of everything in sight. In the perusal of the history of the development of this continent it seems almost ludicrous to describe the natives particularly as the savages. One could fill a library with volumes detailing the murderous brutality of the white race, not only in dealing with the natives, but with each other. The native was hardly more than a good second in rapine and butchery, even when he was employed by one side or the other to raise slaughter to a fine art.