e sent Tonty and Father Membre,
with some voyageurs, to make friends with the Indians and bring him word
about the town.

Tonty had seen nothing like it in the New World. The houses were large
and square, of sun-baked brick, with a dome of canes overhead. The two
largest were the chief's house and the temple. Doors were the only
openings. Tonty and the friar were taken in where the chief sat on a
bedstead with his squaws, and sixty old men, in white mulberry bark
cloaks, squatted by with the dignity of a council. The wives, in order
to honor the sovereign, yelled.

The temple was a place where dead chiefs' bones were kept. A mud wall
built around it was ornamented with skulls. The inside was very rough.
Something like an altar stood in the center of the floor; and a fire of
logs was kept burning before it, and never allowed to go out, filling
the place with smoke, and irritating the eyes of two old Indians who
tended it in half darkness. The Frenchmen were not allowed to look into
a secret place where the temple treasure was kept. But, hearing it
consisted of pearls and trinkets, Tonty conjectured the Indians had got
it from the Spanish. This tribe was not unlike the Aztecs of Mexico.
The chief came in barbaric grandeur to visit La Salle, dressed in white,
having fans carried before him, and a plate of burnished copper to
represent the sun, for these lower Mississippians were sun-worshipers.

With gifts and the grave consideration which instantly won Indians, La
Salle moved from tribe to tribe towards the Gulf. Red River pulsed upon
the course like a discharging artery. The sluggish alligator woke from
the ooze and poked up his snout at the canoes. "He is," says a quaint
old writer who made that journey afterwards, "the most frightful
master-fish that can be seen. I saw one that was as large as half a
hogshead. There are some, they say, as large as a hogshead and twelve
to fifteen feet long. I have no doubt they would swallow up a man if
they caught him."

[Illustration: La Salle at the Mouth of the Mississippi.]

In April La Salle reached his goal. He found that the Mississippi
divided its current into three strands and entered the Gulf through
three mouths. He separated his party; La Salle took the west passage,
and Tonty and another lieutenant the middle and the east. At the Gulf of
Mexico they came together again, and with solemn ceremonies claimed for
France all the country along the great river's entire lengt