The quarrellings of this expedition (due in part to the divided command); the failure to find the mouth of the Mississippi since, we are told, La Salle had been unable in 1682 to determine its longitude; the landing on the shores of Texas, far beyond the mouth of the Mississippi; the loss of one of the vessels to the Spanish, the wreck of two others, and the return of the fourth to France; the miserable fate of the colony left on those desolate shores; the long search of La Salle and his companions for the "fatal river"--these make a dismal story whose details cannot be rehearsed here, a story whose tragic end was the murder of La Salle by one of his own disaffected followers in March, 1687, on the banks of the Trinity River. There is time, as we hasten on, for only a few words over the body of this "iron man," left "a prey to the buzzards and wolves" of the wilderness in which he sacrificed all, as Champlain, for France. "One of the greatest men of his age," said Tonty, who was nearest to him in all his labors save his last. "Without question one of the most remarkable explorers whose names live in history," writes Parkman. [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 430.] His "personality is impressed in some respects more strongly than that of any other upon the history of New France," says another historian, Fiske. [Footnote: "New France and New England," p. 132.] "For force of will and vast conceptions; for various knowledge and quick adaptation of his genius to untried circumstances; for a sublime magnanimity, that resigned itself to the will of Heaven, and yet triumphed over affliction by energy of purpose and unfaltering hope--this daring adventurer had no superior among his countrymen," says Bancroft. [Footnote: "History of the United States," 3: 173.] And further, in the estimate of a recent historian of the valley, "for all the qualities of rugged manhood, courage, persistency that could not be broken, contempt of pain and hardship, he has never been surpassed." [Footnote: James K. Hosmer, "Short History of the Mississippi Valley," p. 140.]