Louis the Great, when he heard the news of the failure of the enterprise, took no steps to {277} relieve the forlorn little band of exiles on the coast of Texas. Not so Tonty. That brave soul determined to rescue them, if possible. For the third time he voyaged down the Mississippi, turned up the Red River, and penetrated as far as the country of the Caddoes.[3] There he lost the most of his ammunition in crossing a river, his men mutinied and refused to go further, and he was compelled to turn back. On his way down the Red River he encountered a flood and traveled more than a hundred miles through country covered with water. The party slept on logs laid side by side and were reduced to eating their dogs. Few men who figure in our country's early story are more deserving of honorable remembrance than this man with one hand and with the heart of a lion. The French King neglected the exiles in Texas, but the Spanish King did not. He ordered a force sent from Mexico, to destroy the nest of invaders. When the Spanish soldiers arrived on the spot, not a human being was to be seen. The poor little fort was a ruin, and a few {278} skeletons were all that remained of its former inmates. The Indians in the neighborhood told a story of a band of warriors who had entrapped the garrison into opening the gates, on the plea of trading, and then had rushed in and massacred them. [Illustration: The Murder of La Salle] Thus ended, for the time, La Salle's brilliant scheme of colonizing Louisiana. Supplement to Chapter XIV The Executor of La Salle's Plan of Colonization.--First Experiences of the Settlers.--Bienville's Shrewdness in getting rid of the English.--New Orleans Founded.--Character of the Population.--Indian Wars. La Salle was dead, but his bright dream of France enthroned on the Mississippi, holding in her hand the sceptre of the great West, was too vital to die. It was growing more and more into the consciousness of sea-going Europe, that the nation holding the mouth of the Great River would grasp the key to the undeveloped wealth of the Western World. So it was that when France stretched forth her hand to seize the coveted prize, she found rivals in the field, Spain and {279} Great Britain struggling for a foothold, Spain already planted at Pensacola, the English nosing about the mouth of the Mississippi. The man who was destined to achieve what La Salle had been hindered from accomplishing only by the blunder of his pilots and the jealousy of his associates, was Jean Baptiste LeMoyne de Bienville.