grew faint, he named his fort Crèvecœur—'Broken Heart.'"[1]
Leaving here his thirty men under Tonty to build a new boat, and sending Hennepin to the Upper Mississippi, the indomitable hero set out for Canada to secure additional material for his new boat. Ascending the Kankakee he crossed the portage to the western extremity of Lake Erie and passed on through the lakes to Niagara.
Fort Crèvecœur was plundered and deserted, but La Salle, in the winter of 1681–82 was again dragging his sledges over the portage to the Illinois on his way to the great river which he, first of Europeans, should fully traverse, "but which fate seemed to have decreed that he should never reach." On the ninth of the following April the brave man stood at last at its mouth, and beside a column bearing the arms of France, a cross and a leaden plate claiming all the territory from which those waters came, he took possession of the richest four million square miles of earth for Louis XIV. "That the Mississippi
- ↑ Hinsdale's Old Northwest, pp. 34–35.
