ere his wife was in high
favor, Count Frontenac dispatched La Salle to France in 1674 with letters
of strongest recommendation, which, no doubt, Jean Talon, the former
Intendant, indorsed on the spot. La Salle's case was a strong one. He
was to offer to found a line of forts establishing French dominion from
Lake Ontario to the valley of the Mississippi, which Jolliet had just
explored. In return, he asked for patent of nobility and the grant of a
seigniory at Fort Frontenac; in other words, the monopoly of the furs
there, which would easily clear him $20,000 a year. It has never been
proved, but one may suspect that his profits were to be divided with
Count Frontenac. Both requests were at once granted; and La Salle came
back to a hornet's nest of enmity in Canada. Space forbids to tell of
the means taken to defeat him; for, by promising to support Recollet
friars at his fort instead of Jesuits, La Salle had added {137} to the
enmity of the merchants, the hatred of the Jesuits. Poison was put in
his food. Iroquois were stirred up to hostility against him.

Meanwhile no enmity checks his ardor. He has replaced the wooden walls
of Fort Frontenac with stone, mounted ten cannon, manned the fort with
twenty soldiers, maintained more than forty workmen, cleared one hundred
acres for crops, and in 1677 is off again for France to ask permission to
build another fort above Niagara. This time, when La Salle comes out, he
is accompanied by a man famous in American annals, a soldier of fortune
from Italy, cousin of Duluth the bushrover, one Henry Tonty, a man with a
copper hand, his arm having been shattered in war, who presently comes to
have repute among the Indians as a great "medicine man," because blows
struck by that metal hand have a way of being effective. By 1678 the
fort is built above Niagara. By 1679 a vessel of forty-five tons and ten
cannon is launched on Lake Erie, the _Griffon_, the first vessel to plow
the waters of the Great Lakes. As she slides off her skids, August 17,
to go up to Michilimackinac for a cargo of furs, _Te Deum_ is chanted
from the new fort, and Louis Hennepin, the Dutch friar, standing on deck
in full vestments, asks Heaven's blessing on the ship's venture.

Scant is the courtesy of the Michilimackinac traders as the _Griffon's_
guns roar salute to the fort. Cold is the welcome of the Jesuits as La
Salle enters their chapel dressed in scarlet mantle trimmed with gold.
And to be fra