Meanwhile no enmity checks his ardor. He has replaced the wooden walls of Fort Frontenac with stone, mounted ten cannon, manned the fort with twenty soldiers, maintained more than forty workmen, cleared one hundred acres for crops, and in 1677 is off again for France to ask permission to build another fort above Niagara. This time, when La Salle comes out, he is accompanied by a man famous in American annals, a soldier of fortune from Italy, cousin of Duluth the bushrover, one Henry Tonty, a man with a copper hand, his arm having been shattered in war, who presently comes to have repute among the Indians as a great "medicine man," because blows struck by that metal hand have a way of being effective. By 1678 the fort is built above Niagara. By 1679 a vessel of forty-five tons and ten cannon is launched on Lake Erie, the _Griffon_, the first vessel to plow the waters of the Great Lakes. As she slides off her skids, August 17, to go up to Michilimackinac for a cargo of furs, _Te Deum_ is chanted from the new fort, and Louis Hennepin, the Dutch friar, standing on deck in full vestments, asks Heaven's blessing on the ship's venture. Scant is the courtesy of the Michilimackinac traders as the _Griffon's_ guns roar salute to the fort. Cold is the welcome of the Jesuits as La Salle enters their chapel dressed in scarlet mantle trimmed with gold. And to be frank, though La Salle was backed by the King, he had no right to trade at Michilimackinac, for his monopoly explicitly states he shall not interfere with the trade of the north, but barter only with the tribes towards the Illinois. Never mind! he loads his ships to the water line with furs to pay his increasing debts, and sends the ship on down to Niagara with the cargo, while he and Tonty, with different parties, proceed to the south end of Lake Michigan to cross the Chicago portage leading to the Mississippi. Did the jealous traders bribe the pilot to sink the ship to bottom? Who knows? Certain it is when Tonty and La Salle went down the {138} Illinois early in the new year of 1680, news of disasters came thick and fast. The _Griffon_ had sunk with all her cargo. The ship from France with the year's supplies for La Salle at Fort Frontenac had been wrecked at the mouth of the St. Lawrence; and worse than these losses, which meant financial ruin, here among the Illinois Indians were Mascoutin Indian spies bribed to stir up trouble for La Salle. Small wonder that he named the fort built here Fort Crèvecoeur,--Fort Broken Heart. [Illustration: THE BUILDING OF THE _GRIFFON_ (After the engraving in Father Hennepin's "Nouvelle Découverte," Amsterdam, 1704)] If La Salle had been fur trader only, as his enemies averred, and not patriot, one wonders why he did not sit still in his fort at Frontenac and draw his profits of $20,000 a year, instead of risking loss and poison and ruin and calumny and death by chasing the phantom of his great desire to found a New France on the Mississippi.