How could it be otherwise when they lived, some of them, on a settlement owned by a gentleman called d'Artagnan and managed, as was appropriate, by two musketeers. One almost expects the names of those two to have been Porthos and Aramis; but they were d'Artiguidres and De Benac. And these men recalled their country in more important things than names and attitudes. Cadillac had scarcely given a name to the spot where he meant to create a town than he sent for his wife and younger son. It was to be a town, indeed, with wives and children and family life, and it was so, and it has ever been so since Cadillac willed it. When La Salle was killed in his second journey to the Mississippi in 1687, he had with him his brother and two nephews. The newcomers soon discovered that the region was not the metallic eldorado they had heard of it in Europe, but that it was a matchless agricultural country, and they began cutting the trees and tilling the ground, with none of the modern instruments and helps, no harvesting machines from "Chicago," as the then desert spot was called in their days; no horses, no horned cattle. They led, indeed not in fiction, but in truth--and long before the famous "Mariner of York" was wrecked by the Orinoco River--the life of Robinson Crusoe. Unknown to Europe, far from any neighbors, by the shade of the pathless forest, they tried their best. They died, many of them obscurely, leaving no name to be engraved on the bronze tables of history, but leaving better than a mere name--families, many of which still subsist; better than families--examples of earnestness and endurance, creating a tradition which will never die out, "Rien ne se perd."