Leaving them that he might get treatment for his ailment and promising that he never would forget them, he started for home, but he succumbed on the banks of the Great Lake on May 18th, 1675. In compliance with his request, he was buried there, but a year later the Ottawa Indians, finding the grave, opened it, and took the remains to St. Ignace in a great procession of canoes and buried under the chapel the great priest with solemn ceremonies. Early in the next century the chapel was destroyed by fire. In 1877 the remains of a burned building were discovered at the site of the old mission and the remains wrapped in birch bark were discovered. Small wonder it is that his name lives throughout that great fertile valley, drained by the river of a hundred thousand streams, the man of courage, kindliness of heart and speech, of unselfish devotion and high ideals, a fitting hero for a land that becoming fabulously rich in material wealth needs the inspiration of the life of the simple, zealous priest who put the good of others above his own pleasure and comfort. CHAPTER IV. LA SALLE AND THE GREATER NEW FRANCE. “The fertile plains of Texas, the vast basin of the Mississippi from its frozen springs to the sultry borders of the gulf; from the wooded ridges of the Alleghanies to the bare peaks of the Rocky Mountains,—a region of savannas and forests, sun-cracked deserts and grassy prairies, watered by a thousand rivers, ranged by a thousand warlike tribes.” —PARKMAN. LA SALLE AND THE GREATER NEW FRANCE. With the exception of Champlain, the most romantic figure in the history of New France is that of La Salle, the young adventurer from Rouen. He landed at Quebec in 1666, the same year as Marquette, and went at once to Montreal where he had relatives among the Sulpician order of priests, to whom most of the island of Montreal belonged. Here he purchased from them an estate or seigniory, as it was called. This was but a few miles west of Montreal, and was called in derision by his friends “La Chine,” having reference to La Salle’s dream of finding a road to China by following westward.