I will "make the _Griffin_ fly above the crows," La Salle is recorded to have said more than once in his threat toward those of the Black Gowns who were opposing his imperious plans, because they aimed at the occupation, fortification, and settlement of what the order still hoped to keep for itself. But the flight of this aquatic griffin gave to La Salle no good omen of triumph. The vessel never reached safe port, so far as is known. Tonty searched all the east coast of Lake Michigan for sight of her sail, but in vain. And those whom in America we call "researchers"--those who hunt through manuscripts in libraries--have not as yet had word of her. Many have doubtless walked, as I, the shores of that lake with thoughts of her, but no one has found so much as a feather of her pinions. Whether she foundered in a storm or was treacherously sunk and her cargo stolen, no one will probably ever know. La Salle and his men in their heavily laden canoes had a tempestuous voyage up the west shore of Lake Michigan. [Footnote: It will illustrate what a change has come over a bit of that shore along which he passed if I tell you that when I landed there one day from a later lake _Griffin_, at a place called Milwaukee--in La Salle's day but another "nameless barbarism"--the first person whom I encountered chanced to be reading a copy of _the London Spectator_--the ultimate symbol of civilization some would think it.] They passed the site of Chicago, deciding upon another course (which persuades me that La Salle must have been in that region before) and on till they reached the mouth of the St. Joseph River, where precious time was lost in waiting for Tonty and his party coming up the other shore. I take space to speak in such detail of this voyage because it traces another important route into the valley. About seventy miles up the stream there stands an old cedar-tree bearing, as it is believed by antiquarians, the blaze marks of the old French broadaxes and marking the beginning of another of those historic portage paths over the valley's low rim. I have visited this portage more than once, and when last there I dug away the sand and soil about the trunk of the tree till I could trace the scar left by the axe of the French. It is only about two miles from this tree at the bend of the St. Joseph to where a mere ditch in the midst of the prairie, a tributary of the Illinois, soon gathers enough eager water to carry a canoe toward the Gulf of Mexico. I have read in the chronicles, with a regret as great as that of the hungry Hennepin, that the Illinois, from whom La Salle expected hospitality at their village farther down the Illinois River, which had been visited by Marquette twice, were off on their hunting expeditions. But I have satisfaction in knowing that he took needful food from their caches in my own county, now named La Salle.