Fort Crèvecoeur was plundered and deserted, but La Salle, in the winter of 1681-82 was again dragging his sledges over the portage to the Illinois on his way to the great river which he, first of Europeans, should fully traverse, "but which fate seemed to have decreed that he should never reach." On the ninth of the following April the brave man stood at last at its mouth, and beside a column bearing the arms of France, a cross and a leaden plate claiming all the territory from which those waters came, he took possession of the richest four million square miles of earth for Louis XIV. "That the Mississippi Valley was laid open to the eyes of the world by a _voyageur_ who came overland from Canada, and not by a _voyageur_ who ploughed through the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico from Spain, is a fact of far-reaching import. The first Louisiana was the whole valley; this and the Lake-St. Lawrence Basin made up the second New France ... the two blended and supplemented each other geographically...."[11] The second New France was united to Louisiana by hinges; these hinges were the portage paths which joined them. The importance of these routes of travel did not by any means pass when once the explorers and missionaries had hurried over them and brought back news of the lands to which they led. The economic history of these routes is both interesting and important, and should be considered, perhaps, before reviewing their military significance. As we have had occasion to notice, straits and portages were famous meeting places. La Salle and Joliet met between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario; Joliet and Marquette met at Mackinaw. All routes converged on these narrow land and water courses, while on the broad lakes sojourners passed each other at short distances unwittingly. For in the old days of canoes the coming and going routes varied with a thousand circumstances. Of course the traveler's general rule was to reach quickest waters flowing toward his destination. If he was making for the mouth of the Mississippi from Montreal his best route would be to turn south from Lake Ontario to the first easterly head of the Allegheny River, in preference to pushing further west to the head of any of the other tributaries of the Mississippi. Following the same rule, the route from Quebec to the Kennebec Valley was by way of Moosehead Lake; the return route was by way of the Dead River. A person returning from the "Falls of the Ohio" (Louisville, Kentucky) to Canada would, other things being equal, make for the nearest head of a stream flowing into Lake Erie.