After a vain,
anxious search for Tonty among the ruins and the dead, he makes his way
back, finding at last at the junction of the two rivers that make the
Illinois a bit of wood cut by a saw.
I fear to tire the reader with the monotony of the mere rehearsal of
difficulty and discouragement and despairful circumstance which I feel it
needful to present in order to give faithful background to the story of
the valley. I have by no means told all: of continued malevolence where
there should have been help; of the conspiracy of every possible untoward
circumstance to block his way. But the telling of so much will be
tolerated in the knowledge that, after all, his master spirit did triumph
over every ill and obstacle. With Tonty, who, as he writes, is full of
zeal, he confounded his enemies at home, gathered the tribes of the west
into a confederacy against the Iroquois, as Champlain had done in the
east, gave up for the present the building of the vessel, and in 1681, the
river being frozen, set out on sledges at Chicago portage and made a
prosperous journey down the Illinois to Fort Crevecoeur.
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