THE RIVER AND ITS EXPLORERS.

15

out from their starting-point), where a tribe of war-whooping savages
swarmed out to meet and murder them; but they appealed to the
Virgin for help; so in place of a fight there was a feast, and plenty
of pleasant palaver and fol-de-rol.

They had proved to their satisfaction, that the Mississippi did not
empty into the Gulf of California, or into the Atlantic. They
believed it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico. They turned back, now,
and carried their great *i,ews to Canada.

LA SALLE ON THE ICE.
But belief is not proof. It was reserved for La Salle to furnish
the proof. 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. They moved in procession
down the surface of the frozen river, on foot, and dragging their
canoes after them on sledges.