But the French were short of supplies and could not stay long after the symbols of sovereignty had been raised aloft.  Paddling slowly against the current.  La Salle and his party reached the Illinois only in August.  Here La Salle and Tonty built their Fort St. Louis and here they spent the winter.  During the next summer (1683) the indefatigable explorer journeyed down to Quebec, and on the last ship of the year took passage for France.  In the meantime, Frontenac, always his firm friend and supporter, had been recalled, and La Barre, the new governor, was unfriendly.  A direct appeal to the home authorities for backing seemed the only way of securing funds for further explorations.

Accordingly, early in 1684 La Salle appeared at the French court with elaborate plans for founding a colony in the valley of the lower Mississippi.  This time the expedition was to proceed by sea.  To this project the King gave his assent, and commanded the royal officers to furnish the supplies.  By midsummer four ships were ready to set sail for the Gulf.  Once more, however, troubles beset La Salle on every hand.  Disease broke out on the vessels; the officers quarreled among themselves; the expedition was attacked by the Spaniards, and one ship was lost.  Not until the end of December was a landing made, and then not at the Mississippi’s mouth but at a spot far to the west of it, on the sands of Matagorda Bay.

Finding that he had missed his reckonings, La Salle directed a part of his company to follow the shore.  After many days of fruitless search, they established a permanent camp and sent the largest vessel back to France.  Their repeated efforts to reach the Mississippi overland were in vain.  Finally, in the winter of 1687, La Salle with a score of his strongest followers struck out northward, determined to make their way to the Lakes, where they might find succor.  To follow the detail of their dreary march would be tedious.  The hardships of the journey, without adequate equipment or provisions, and the incessant danger of attack by the Indians increased petty jealousies into open mutiny.  On the 19th of March, 1687, the courageous and indefatigable La Salle was treacherously assassinated by one of his own party.  Here in the fastnesses of the Southwest died at the age of forty-four the intrepid explorer of New France, whom Tonty called—­perhaps not untruthfully—­“one of the greatest men of this age.”

“Thus,” writes a later historian with all the perspective of the intervening years, “was cut short the career of a man whose personality is impressed in some respects more strongly than that of any other upon the history of New France.  His schemes were too far-reaching to succeed.  They required the strength and resources of a half-dozen nations like the France of Louis XIV.  Nevertheless the lines upon which New France continued to develop were substantially those which La Salle had in mind, and the fabric of a wilderness empire, of which he laid the foundations, grew with the general growth of colonization, and in the next century became truly formidable.  It was not until Wolfe climbed the Heights of Abraham that the great ideal of La Salle was finally overthrown.”