In preparation for his explorations he settled down to acquaint himself with the Indian languages, and hearing from some Seneca Indians that there was a great river called the Ohio, which he thought might lead him to the great Western Sea, he joined the expedition of Galinée and Father Dollier, the Sulpician, who were setting out to establish a mission in the Far West. With nine canoes and twenty-one men they skirted the eastern and southern shores of Lake Ontario, and about the middle of September reached the mouth of a river which Galinée describes: “We discovered a river one-eighth of a league wide and extremely rapid.” The Indians told them of a great cataract up this river which was “higher than the highest pine trees,” and indeed he tells us he could hear the roar. But they had a set purpose and pressed on their way, thus losing the opportunity to be the first white men to visit the Falls of Niagara. Indeed this is the first description of the river by any one who is known to have reached it. They passed on to Burlington Bay and leaving it about where Hamilton now stands, they struck across the country, and on the 24th of September, in an Indian village in what is known as the Beverley Swamp, near the present city of Galt, they met Joliet returning from his search for the copper mines on Lake Superior. La Salle was so attracted by Joliet, a kindred adventurer in spirit, that he turned back and left Dollier and Galinée to go on to the West, guided as to their course by the advice of Joliet, who told them of the Pottawatomies, a tribe of Indians to whom no missionary had yet come. They went down the Grand River and as the season was so far advanced they built a shelter on the lake shore near where Port Dover now stands, erected a cross and took formal possession of the Lake Erie country in the name of Louis the Magnificent.[10] Here they spent the winter and are enthusiastic in their praise of the mildness of the climate and the luscious autumn fruit. This is of great interest to many of us who to-day look upon that county (Norfolk) as one of the greatest fruit centres of the province of Ontario. La Salle returned east, and we know that during the next few years he was with Frontenac, and doubtless made many exploration trips. But in 1675 he received from the French Government a grant on Lake Ontario similar to the seigniory at La Chine, and so at Cataraqui, where Kingston now stands, he built a fort to control the trade coming east and to prevent it from going to the English colony in New York. This he called “Fort Frontenac.” He was raised to the nobility and was given a commission in 1678 to discover the “Western part of New France” and “to construct forts in the places you may think necessary.” This meant that he would seek out the mouth of the great Mississippi and erect a chain of forts which would connect and hold for France the country from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi.