Early in November he arrived at the mission of Fort Frontenac,
which he had two or three years before helped to establish in the wilds.
Soon La Salle's lieutenants, La Motte and Tonty, appeared with most of the
men, and while some were despatched in canoes to Lake Michigan to gather
the buffalo-hides and beaver-skins against the coming of the ship, whose
keel had not yet been laid, the rest (La Motte, Hennepin, and sixteen men)
embarked for the Niagara River, by which the upper lakes empty into Lake
Ontario and the St. Lawrence. After a tempestuous voyage up and across the
lake they reached this river, whose torrent fury, gathered of "four inland
oceans," stopped even the canoes. Then, led of the priest, they toiled up
the cliffs called the "Three Mountains," because, I suppose, of the three
terraces. (Having climbed up the face of the cliffs in winter, with a
heavy camera for my portable altar, and having broken the great icicles
formed by the trickling stream over one of the terraces, in order to make
my way across a narrow ledge to the top of the precipice, I am able to
know what the journey must have meant to those first European travellers.
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