But I have satisfaction in knowing that he took needful food from their
caches in my own county, now named La Salle.
Early in January they passed on to a village four days beyond--the site of
the second largest city in the State of Illinois. 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. The vessel for
the Mississippi he bravely decides to build despite the desertion of his
sawyers, who had fled to the embrace of barbarism and who, fortunately,
did not return to prevent the employment of the unskilled hands of La
Salle himself and some others of his men.
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