In the meantime La Salle had chosen a place for a temporary fort, on a
river which the French called La Vache (Cow River), on account of the
buffaloes in its vicinity, and which retains the name, in the Spanish
form, Lavaca.

La Salle returned from an exploration unsuccessful. He had found
nothing, learned nothing; only, he knew now that he was not near the
Mississippi. The summer had worn away, {267} steadily filling the
graveyard, and, with the coming of the autumn, he prepared for a more
extensive exploration. On the last day of October he started out with
fifty men on his grand journey of exploration, leaving Joutel, his
faithful lieutenant, in command of the fort, which contained
thirty-four persons, including three Recollet friars and a number of
women and girls.

The winter passed not uncomfortably for the party in the fort. The
surrounding prairie swarmed with game, buffaloes, deer, turkeys, ducks,
geese, and plover. The river furnished an abundance of turtles, and
the bay of oysters. Joutel gives a very entertaining account of his
killing rattlesnakes, which his dog was wont to find, and of shooting
alligators. The first time that he went buffalo-hunting, the animals
were very numerous, but he did not seem to kill any. Every one that he
fired at lumbered away, as if it were unhurt. After some time he found
one dead, then others, and he learned that he had killed several.
After their wont they had kept their feet while life lasted. Even the
friars took a hand in buffalo-hunting.

La Salle and his party, meanwhile, were roaming wearily from tribe to
tribe, usually fighting {268} their way, always seeking the
Mississippi. At last they came to a large river which at first they
mistook for it. Here La Salle built a stockade and left some of his
men, of whose fate nothing was afterward heard. Then he set out to
return to Fort St. Louis, as he called his little fort on Lavaca. One
day in March he reappeared with his tattered and footsore followers,
some of them carrying loads of buffalo-meat.

Surely the condition of affairs was dismal in the extreme. More than a
year gone, and as yet the Frenchmen did not even know where they were.
The fierce heat of another summer was near. Still La Salle, with his
matchless courage, so soon as he recovered from a fit of illness,
formed a desperate resolve. He would start out again, find the
Mississippi, ascend that river and the Illinois to Canada, and bring