[Illustration: Rene Robert Cavalier, Sieur de la Salle] We now come to sure ground when we follow La Salle's later explorations, on which his fame entirely rests. Frontenac entered heartily into his plans of following the Mississippi to its mouth, and setting at rest the doubts that existed as to its course. He received from the King a grant of Fort Frontenac and its surrounding lands as a seigniory. This fort had been built by the governor in 1673 at Cataraqui, now Kingston, as an advanced trading and defensive post on Lake Ontario. La Salle considered it a most advantageous position for carrying on his ambitious projects of exploration. He visited France in 1677 and received from the King letters-patent {186} authorising him to build forts south and west in that region "through which it would seem a passage to Mexico can be discovered." On his return to Canada he was accompanied by a Recollet friar, Father Louis Hennepin, and by Henry de Tonty, the son of an Italian resident of Paris, both of whom have associated their names with western exploration. Of all his friends and followers, Tonty, who had a copper hand in the place of the one blown off in an Italian war, was the most faithful and honest, through the varying fortunes of the explorer's career from this time forward. To Father Hennepin I refer in another place. Both Hennepin and Tonty accompanied La Salle on his expedition of 1678 to the Niagara district, where, above the great falls, near the mouth of Cayuga Creek, he built the first vessel that ever ventured on the lakes, and which he named the "Griffin" in honour of Frontenac, whose coat-of-arms bore such a heraldic device. The loss of this vessel, while returning with a cargo of furs from Green Bay to Niagara, was a great blow to La Salle, who, from this time until his death, suffered many misfortunes which might well have discouraged one of less indomitable will and fixity of purpose. On the banks of the Illinois River, a little below the present city of Peoria, he built Fort Crevecoeur, probably as a memorial of a famous fort in the Netherlands, not long before captured by the French. While on a visit to Canada, this post was destroyed by some of his own men in the absence of Tonty, who had been left in charge. These men were subsequently captured not far from Cataraqui, and severely punished. {187}