The early efforts of La Salle were unsatisfactory. He built a fort at Niagara and constructed a vessel called the _Griffin_, which foundered on Lake Michigan and left him in a hostile country swarming with savages, without supplies, and with mutinous followers. Nevertheless he kept on and descended the Illinois River, determined to reach the Gulf of Mexico. In 1680 his men began to desert, but Tonty and a faithful few assisted him to construct Fort Crèvecoeur on the Illinois. Here the discoverer left his lieutenant for a time while he returned to Canada for supplies. The men mutinied, abandoned the fort, and followed La Salle with the intention of murdering him. Meantime he had sent out an expedition under Father Hennepin which had been captured by the Sioux Indians on the Upper Mississippi in what is now Minnesota. The Flemish friar and his followers were rescued by a Canadian backwoodsman, Du Luth, and Hennepin returned to France to write his account of the Mississippi. Father Membré has left a record of La Salle's great expedition. "M. La Salle having arrived safely at Miamies on the 3rd of November 1681, began with his ordinary activity and vast mind to make all preparations for his departure.... The whole party consisted of about fifty-four persons, including the Sieur de Tonty and the Sieur Dautray, the son of the late Sieur Bourdon."[252] The expedition safely passed the mouths of the Missouri and Ohio; after building a fort, the adventurers reached the Arkansas, where they were welcomed by the Indians, who knew nothing of white men. "The Sieur de la Salle took possession of this country with great ceremony. He planted a cross and set up the king's arms, at which the Indians showed a great joy.... On our return from the sea we found that they had surrounded the cross with a palisade."[253] Passing still farther south, "we arrived on the 6th of April at a point where the river divides into three channels. The Sieur de la Salle divided his party the next day into three bands, to go and explore them. He took the western, the Sieur Dautray the southern, the Sieur Tonty ... the middle one."[254] On the 9th of April the three parties met on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. This success was marked by the ceremony of planting the cross and raising the arms of France. La Salle took possession of the river and all the country round in the name of the king, and amidst a volley of muskets a leaden plate inscribed with the action and the names of the discoverers was deposited in the ground. Such was the foundation of the French in Louisiana. La Salle and his party returned to the North, but he was not the man to rest upon his laurels, for in the autumn of 1682 and the spring of 1683 he is to be found busily establishing a French colony on the Illinois. Fort Louis was built on a rocky summit and promised to be a most important station in the future, always on the one condition that the connection with Canada was in no