The memorandum, which serves as authority for the facts just narrated, was addressed to Colbert, and sent to France by a ship sailing from Quebec shortly before the close of navigation. The minister's reply was dated 17th May of the following year. He does not at all congratulate Frontenac upon his exploit. "You will readily understand," he says, "by what I have just told you,[11] that his Majesty's intention is not that you undertake great voyages by ascending the river St. Lawrence, nor that the inhabitants spread themselves for the future further than they have already done. On the contrary, he desires that you labour incessantly, and during the whole time you are in that country, to consolidate, concentrate, and form them into towns and villages, that they may be in a better position to defend themselves successfully." In acknowledging this despatch, far from apologizing for what he had done, Frontenac told the minister that the very best results had flowed from it. More Indians had come to Montreal than ever before, eight hundred having been seen at one time; Iroquois, Algonquins, and Hurons were mixing with one another in the most friendly manner; the Jesuit missionaries among the Iroquois found their position greatly improved, and were never tired of saying so; and, finally, he had obtained the Indian children he had asked for, eight in number, who were being educated in the French fashion, and who would be a perpetual guarantee of the peaceful behaviour of the tribes to which they belonged. At the same time he says, that if the minister absolutely disapproves of the fort, he will go next year and pull it down with as much alacrity as he had put it up. This the minister did not insist on. In fact he was not long in coming round to Frontenac's view that considering all the circumstances of the case the fort was a necessity. One point of interest connected with its establishment, upon which Frontenac has left us in ignorance, is whom he appointed as its first commandant. A contemporary writer[12] tells us it was La Salle, and the statement is not improbable. It was La Salle, as we have seen, whom the governor sent to the Iroquois to invite them to the conference, and as he had acquitted himself of that mission in the most successful manner, it seems natural that he should have been the first chosen to command a post, the principal object of which was to serve as a convenient meeting-place for Iroquois and French. A temporary concession of the fort was made a year later to two Montreal merchants, Bazire and Lebert, but it passed again, in the following year, into the hands of La Salle, who had meantime gone to France and laid before the court certain larger schemes for which Fort Frontenac was to serve as a base, and which he obtained the king's authority to carry into effect. [Footnote 6: See particularly the interesting work of Mr. Ernest Myrand, _Frontenac et ses Amis_, Quebec, 1902.]