JOUTEL REACHES A FRENCH POST IN ARKANSAS. 171

out uttering a word, La Salle fell dead. "You are down now, grand bashaw! you are down now!" shouted one of the conspirators, as they despoiled his remains, which were left on the prairie, naked and without burial, to be devoured by wild beasts. Such was the end of this daring adventurer. For force of will and vast conceptions; for various knowledge, and quick adaptation of his genius to untried circumstances; for a sublime magnanimity, that resigned itself to the will of Heaven, and yet triumphed over affliction by energy of purpose and unfaltering hope, he had no superior among his countrymen. He had won the affection of the governor of Canada, the esteem of Colbert, the confidence of Seignelay, the favor of Louis XIV. After beginning the colonization of Upper Canada, he perfected the discovery of the Mississippi from the Falls of St. Anthony to its mouth; and he will be remembered through all time as the father of colonization in the great central valley of the west.

But avarice and passion were not calmed by the blood of La Salle. Duhaut and another of the conspirators, grasping at an unequal share in the spoils, were themselves murdered, while their reckless associates joined a band of savages. Joutel, with the brother and surviving nephew of La Salle, and others, in all but seven, obtained a guide for the Arkansas; and-fording rivulets, crossing ravines, by rafts or boats of buffalo hides making a ferry over rivers, not meeting the cheering custom of the calumet till they reached the country above the Red River, leaving an esteemed companion in a wilderness grave, on which the piety of an Indian matron heaped offerings of maize — at last, on the twenty-fourth of July, as the survivors came upon a branch of the Mississippi, they beheld on an island a large cross. Never did Christian gaze on that emblem with heartier joy. Near it stood a log hut, tenanted by two Frenchmen. Tonti had descended the river, and, full of grief at not finding La Salle, had established a post near the Arkansas.

CHAPTER XLII.

FRANCE CONTENDS FOR THE FISHERIES AND THE GREAT WEST.

SUCH were the events which gave to the French not only New France and Acadia, Hudson's Bay and Newfoundland, but a claim to a moiety of Maine, of Vermont, and to more than a moiety of New York, to the whole valley of the Mississippi, and to Texas even, as far as the Rio Bravo del Norte. Throughout that wide region, it sought to introduce its authority, under the severest forms of the colonial system. That system was enforced, with equal eagerness, by England upon the sea-coast. Could France, and England, and Spain, have amicably divided the American continent, could they have been partners, and not rivals, in oppression, - hope could not have beamed upon the colonies.

But the aristocratic revolution of England was the signal for a war with France, growing out of "a root of enmity," which Marlborough described as "irreconcilable to the government and the religion" of Great Britain. Louis XIV. took up arms in defence of legitimacy; and England had the glorious office of asserting the right of a nation to reform its government. Yet, as the Spanish Netherlands, which constituted the barrier of Holland and Germany against France, could be saved from conquest by France only through the interposition of England and Holland, an alliance followed between the Protestant revolutionary republic and monarchy, on the one side, and the bigoted defender of the Roman Catholic church and legitimacy, on the other. Hence, in the war of King William, the frontiers of Carolina, bordering on the possessions of Spain, were safe against invasion: Spain and England were allies. William III. was not only the defender of the nationality of England, but of the territorial freedom of Europe.

1688.]

CENSUS. FRENCH POSTS.

173

In America, the strife was, on behalf of the respective mother countries, for the fisheries, and for territory at the north and west. If the issue had depended on the condition of the colonies, it could hardly have seemed doubtful. The French census for the North American continent, in 1688, showed but eleven thousand two hundred and forty-nine persons-scarcely a tenth part of the English population on its frontiers - about a twentieth part of English North America.

West of Montreal, the principal French posts, and those but inconsiderable ones, had been at Frontenac, at Mackinaw, and on the Illinois. At Niagara, there was a wavering purpose of maintaining a post, but no permanent occupation. The savages still held the keys of the great west; no intercourse existed but by means of the forest rangers, who penetrated the barren heaths round Hudson's Bay, the morasses of the north-west, the homes of the Sioux and Miamis, the recesses of every forest where there was an Indian with skins to sell. The attention of the court of France was direct'ed to the fisheries; and Acadia had been represented by De Meules as the most important settlement of France. To protect it, the Jesuits Vincent and James Bigot collected a village of Abenakis on the Penobscot; and a flourishing town now marks the spot where the baron de St. Castin, a veteran officer of the regiment of Carignan, established a trading fort.

Thus France, bounding its territory next New England by the Kennebec, claimed the whole eastern coast, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, Newfoundland, Labrador, and Hudson's Bay; and, to assert and defend this boundless region, Acadia and its dependencies counted but nine hundred French inhabitants. The missionaries, swaying the mind of the Abenakis, were the sole source of hope.

On the declaration of war by France against England, in June, 1689, Count Frontenac, once more governor of Canada, was charged to recover Hudson's Bay, to protect Acadia, and, by a descent from Canada, to