Parkman sums up the character of La Salle in this fine passage: "Serious in all things, incapable of the lighter pleasures, incapable of repose, finding no joy but in pursuit of great designs, too shy for society and too reserved for popularity, often unsympathetic and always seeming so, smothering emotions he could not utter, schooled to universal distrust, stern to his followers and pitiless to himself, bearing the brunt of every hardship and every danger, demanding of others an equal constancy joined to an implicit deference, heeding no counsel but his own, attempting the impossible and grasping at what was too vast to hold,--he contained in his own complex and painful nature the chief springs of his triumphs, his failures, and his death." The Chicago-Desplaines portage was used to a constantly increasing degree in the following years. Missionaries, traders, and military people found it a convenient point for residence or as a thoroughfare to the Illinois River. But on account of divided counsels among the French authorities at Quebec there were no adequate measures taken to protect the whites from the encroachments and hostility of the savages, so that early in the next century the portage declined in importance and fell into disuse, other routes to the interior being preferred. The name "Chicago," in some of the numerous forms of spelling employed, is met with on the maps of successively later dates, occasionally in the reports of French commandants at Detroit or Mackinac, and more frequently in the letters of the missionaries preserved in that extensive collection known as the _Jesuit Relations_. After the victory of Wolfe over Montcalm and the fall of Quebec, the French ceded in 1763 all their western possessions to the English, which "left France without a foothold on the American main." [Illustration: THE WILD ONION PLANT. _That the name "Chicago" was derived from an Indian word meaning "wild onion," is believed by most authorities. Schoolcraft tells us that the word was Chi-kaug-ong, meaning wild leek or onion._ _Cadillac, the French commandant at Mackinac in 1695, mentioned in a report the name of Chicagou as one of a chain of posts on Lake Michigan, and said that the name signified "river of the wild onion;" and in an Indian treaty of 1773, the river was referred to as "Chicagou, or Garlick Creek." Gurdon S. Hubbard, in his Memoirs, states that the name was derived from the wild onion, and Colonel Samuel A. Storrow, who visited this site in 1817, refers in his letters to "the River Chicagou, or in English, Wild Onion River."_ _The wild onion plant may be seen at the present day growing luxuriantly on the prairies near Chicago._]