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Updated: June 9, 2025
Judged by this standard Frontenac deserves great praise, for he never lacked capable and loyal lieutenants. With Callières at Montreal, Tonty on the Mississippi, Perrot and Du Lhut at Michilimackinac, Villebon and Saint-Castin in Acadia, Sainte-Hélène at the siege of Quebec, and Iberville at Hudson Bay, he was well supported by his staff.
Thus, in the vigor of his manhood, at the age of forty-three, died Robert Cavelier de la Salle, "one of the greatest men," writes Tonty, "of this age;" without question one of the most remarkable explorers whose names live in history.
La Salle returned to France, and obtained the grant of the lordship of this fort and the surrounding country on conditions of maintaining the whole cost of the establishment, and making a settlement of colonists. Another visit to France in 1677-8 secured him further support and capital, and he returned from France with a companion, Henry de Tonty.
He decided, however, to seek his fortune in Canada, and obtained a commission as captain. It was his cousin, Henri de Tonty, who had accompanied La Salle. After returning to France to fight in the wars then going on, he came back to Canada with a younger brother, Claude. He had in him the spirit of great adventurers, and longed to visit the unknown countries of the upper Mississippi.
There La Salle, detained by Indian suspicions of his alliance with the Iroquois, discouraged by the desertion of some of his own men and by the certainty that the Griffin was lost beyond all question not only with its skins but with the materials for a vessel, which he purposed building for the Mississippi waters, stayed for the rest of the winter, building for shelter and protection a fort which he named Fort Crevecoeur, not to memorialize his own disheartenments as some hint, but, as we are assured by other historians, to celebrate the demolition of Fort Crevecoeur in the Netherlands by Louis XIV, in which Tonty had participated.
Fort Crèvecoeur, with its supplies, was the base of his great enterprise. Now it was destroyed, its garrison gone, and Tonty, with a few faithful men, alone remained of his costly expedition.
De Baugis, Cassion, De la Durantaye were upon their feet, but the dragoon first found voice. "Were those words addressed to me, M. de Tonty?" "Ay, and why not! You are no more than La Barre's dog. Listen to me, all three of you. 'Twas Sieur de la Salle's orders that I open the gates of this fort to your entrance, and that I treat you courteously.
He was provokingly delayed, by one misfortune after another, but at last got his expedition under way at the end of the year 1681. In the dead of winter he and Henri de Tonty, son of Lorenzo Tonty, who invented the tontine, his lieutenant, started down the Illinois, with a following of eighteen Indians brought from New England, and twenty-three Frenchmen.
Here is Tonty undertaking, with the most heroic unconcern, a journey of nearly three thousand miles, through such difficulties as it is easy for us to imagine, and leaving a letter to La Salle, as a proof of his visit, in the same way that one would, in these degenerate days of effeminacy, leave a card at a neighbor's house. The French extended their explorations up to the mouth of the Red River.
Boisrondet and Étienne Renault also walked at his side into the open space between two barbaric armies. The Iroquois did not stop firing when he held up and waved the belt in his left hand. Bullets spattered on the hummocky sod of the prairie around him. "Go back," Tonty said to Boisrondet and Renault and the young Indian. "What need is there of so many? Take the lad back, Boisrondet."
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