The season was far advanced. On the bare limbs of the forest hung a few withered remnants of its gay autumnal livery; and the smoke crept upward through the sullen November air from the squalid wigwams of La Salle's Abenaki and Mohegan allies. These, his new friends, were savages, whose midnight yells had startled the border hamlets of New England; who had danced around Puritan scalps, and whom Puritan imaginations painted as incarnate fiends. La Salle chose eighteen of them, "all well inured to war," as his companion Membre writes, and added them to the twenty-three Frenchmen who composed his party. They insisted on taking their women with them, to cook for them, and do other camp work. These were ten in number, besides three children; and thus the expedition included fifty-four persons, of whom some were useless, and others a burden. On the twenty-first of December, Tonty and Membre set out from Fort Miami with some of the party in six canoes, and crossed to the little river Chicago. [Footnote: La Salle, _Relation de la Decouverte_, 1682, in Thomassy, _Geologie Pratique de la Louisiane_, 9; _Lettre du Pere Zenoble_ (Zenobe Membre), 14 Aoust, 1682, MS.; Membre, in Le Clercq, ii. 214; Tonty, _Memoire_, MS.; _Proces Verbal de la Prise de Possession de la Louisiane_. The narrative ascribed to Membre, and published by Le Clercq, is based on the document preserved in the Archives Scientifiques de In Marine, entitled _Relation de la Decouverte de l'Embouchure de la Riviere Mississippi faite par le Sieur de la Salle, l'annee passee_, 1682. The writer of the narrative has used it very freely, copying the greater part verbatim, with occasional additions of a kind which seem to indicate that he had taken part in the expedition. The _Relation de la Decouverte_, though written in the third person, is the official report of the discovery made by La Salle; or perhaps for him, by Membre. Membre's letter of August, 1682, is a brief and succinct statement made immediately after his return.] La Salle, with the rest of the men, joined them a few days later. It was the dead of winter, and the streams were frozen. They made sledges, placed on them the canoes, the baggage, and a disabled Frenchman; crossed from the Chicago to the northern branch of the Illinois, and filed in a long procession down its frozen course. They reached the site of the great Illinois village, found it tenantless, and continued their journey, still dragging their canoes, till at length they reached open water below Lake Peoria.