Presently this pack of curs had news that La Salle was leading an army of Iroquois to their destruction, so instead of preparing for defense they proposed to murder Tonty and his Frenchmen, until the magic of his iron fist quite altered their point of view. Sure enough the Iroquois arrived in force, and the cur pack, three times as strong, went out to fight. Then through the midst of the battle Tonty walked into the enemy’s lines. He ordered the Iroquois to go home and behave themselves, and told such fairy tales about the strength of his curs that these ferocious warriors were frightened. Back walked Tonty to find his cur pack on their knees in tears of gratitude. Again he went to the Iroquois, this time with stiff terms if they wanted peace, but an Illinois envoy gave his game away, with such extravagant bribes and pleas for mercy that the Iroquois laughed at Tonty. They burned the Illinois town, dug up their graveyard, chased the flying nation, butchered the abandoned women and children, and hunted the cur pack across the Mississippi. Tonty and his Frenchmen made their way to their nearest friends, the Pottawattomies, to await La Salle’s return. And La Salle returned. He found the Illinois town in ashes, littered with human bones. He found an island of the river where women and children by hundreds had been outraged, tortured and burned. His fort was a weed-grown ruin. In all the length of the valley there was no vestige of human life, or any clue as to the fate of Tonty and his men. For the third time La Salle made that immense journey to the settlements, wrung blood from stones to equip an expedition, and coming to Lake Michigan rallied the whole of the native tribes in one strong league, a red Indian colony with himself as chief, for defense from the Iroquois. The scattered Illinois returned to their abandoned homes, tribes came from far and wide to join the colony and in the midst, upon Starved Rock, La Salle built Fort Saint Louis as their stronghold. When Tonty joined him, for once this iron man showed he had a heart. So, after all, La Salle led an expedition down the whole length of the Mississippi. He won the friendship of every tribe he met, bound them to French allegiance, and at the end erected the standard of France on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. “In the name of the most high, mighty, invincible and victorious Prince, Louis the Great, by the Grace of God, King of France and of Navarre,” on the nineteenth of April, 1682. La Salle annexed the valley of the Mississippi from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians, from the lakes to the gulf, and named that empire Louisiana. As to the fate of this great explorer, murdered in the wilderness by followers he disdained to treat as comrades, “his enemies were more in earnest than his friends.” XXXVIII A. D. 1741 THE EXPLORERS