“After some time he made a second attempt, on the same river,” which he left below Lake Erie, making a portage of six or seven leagues to embark on that lake, which he left towards the north, going through Lake St. Clair. La Salle himself says in a letter of 1677: “That year, 1667, and those following he made several expensive journeys, in which he discovered the first time the country south of the great lakes, and between them and the great river Ohio. He followed it to a strait, where it fell into great marshes, below 37° latitude.” A letter from M. Talon to the king, dated November 2, 1671, says: “Sieur de La Salle has not yet returned from his journey to the southward of this country.” A memoir of M. de DeNonville, March 8, 1688, says: “La Salle had for several years before he built Crèvecœur, employed canoes for his trade in the rivers Oyo, Oubache and others in the surrounding neighborhood, which flow into the river Mississippi.” A plain meaning of all this is that La Salle entered the Ohio near or at one of its sources, I believe at Lake Chatauqua, six or seven leagues below Lake Erie, and followed it to Louisville. He was engaged in the beaver trade, and in 1671 had a credit at Montreal, payable in beaver. We may be pretty confident that, with his twenty-three or twenty-four men and several canoes, looking for beaver-skins, he did not neglect the Mahoning River, first called Beaver creek. La Salle’s latitude is bad; we would expect that. Joliet’s manuscript map of 1674 lays down the Ohio marked “Route of the Sieur de La Salle to go to Mexico.” The unpublished map of Franquelin of 1688 lays down the Ohio more correctly than it appeared in published maps for sixty years. The discovery was the basis of the French claims to Ohio, and La Salle’s likeness is one of the four great discoverers of America in the Capitol at Washington. But the knowledge gained by La Salle was to be in a great measure lost. The English, stopped by Indians and mountains, were not to settle here. The west and northwest were safer territory for the French. The Iroquois roamed over Ohio, warred with the tribes beyond, even to the Mississippi. The Wabash and Ohio became confounded, often laid down as “Wabash or Ohio,” and most often made running almost parallel with the lake and just about on the high land in Ohio which divides the streams of the north from the south. The magnificent sweep of the Ohio, which embraces our State on the east and south, was lost. The lake had various fortunes. La Hontan made it run down like a great bag half way to the Gulf, but that being in time changed, its south shore was drawn nearly east and west instead of to the southwest westward. No subsequent French writer was so sensible and intelligent as Charlevoix, yet in his great work of three quarto volumes on New France our territory hardly appears, and on the south of Lake Erie in his larger map of it, in 1744, is the legend: “_Toute cette coste n’est presque point connue_”—this