the Bay of St. Louis, or Matagorda Bay, when with extraordinary courage he had started to obtain succor for them from far distant Canada.

The noble companion of La Salle, Henri de Tonty, having learned in September, 1688, of the death of his beloved chief, resolved to find out what had become of the settlers in Texas and to gather a party of Indians to invade northern Mexico. He started, therefore, from the Illinois country in December in a pirogue, accompanied by five Frenchmen, an Indian warrior, and two Indian slaves. Arrived at the village of the Caddos on Red river, his men, with the exception of a Frenchman and an Indian, refused to go any further, but he pushed on with these two to a village eighty leagues distant, where were, he was told, Hiens and his companions. The Indians denied any knowledge of the latter, but Tonty understood by their demeanor that they had perished. He was unable to proceed on his proposed journey and returned to Fort St. Louis of the Illinois in September 1689. His unsuccessful expedition had been daring and chivalric.

Tonty had endeavored to help the unfortunate settlers on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Very different had been the purpose of the Spaniards in Mexico, who had sent in vain four expeditions from Vera Cruz to endeavor to discover La Salle's settlement and to destroy it. A fifth expedition under Alonso de León started from Coahuila, and guided by a French prisoner, they succeeded in reaching the place where had stood Fort St. Louis. They found the buildings empty and in bad condition, as if they had been stormed, and of human beings there were only three lying dead on the prairie. A little later there arrived two men dressed like savages, who proved to be l'Archevêque and Grollet, a Frenchman who had long been with the Indians. From them the Spaniards learned that three months earlier the savages had killed all the settlers at Fort St. Louis, with the exception of the children of a man named Talon, an Italian, and a young man named Breman.

L'Archevêque and Grollet were living with the Tejas Indians, who are supposed to be the same as the Cenis. They were taken by De León to Mexico and sent to Spain, where, says Parkman, "they were thrown into prison with the intention of sending them back to labor in the mines." The surviving settlers were later given up to the Spaniards by the Indians. Two of the sons of Talon, while serving in the Spanish navy, were captured by the French and set free. Their brothers and sisters had been taken to Spain. The Italian was imprisoned in Mexico and nothing is known of Breman.

La Salle's Fort St. Louis was not of long duration, but its history is interesting, as it is connected with that of the intrepid explorer whose life is an imperishable example of courage and fortitude. La Salle's name will ever be remembered in the history of Texas in the exploration of which he lost his life by the treachery of his followers. It is to La Salle that Louisiana owes its soft and harmonious

name.

CHAPTER XVII

ESTABLISHMENT OF MISSIONS

THE expedition of De León to Fort St. Louis was the third sent by land from Mexico in search of the settlement which the French were said to have established on the Bay they called St. Louis and later St. Bernard, but which the Spaniards named Espiritu Santo, and is now known as Matagorda Bay. As De León had proved the fact that the French had endeavored to establish a colony on the Gulf coast, it was decided to send him again to the Bay of Espiritu Santo to destroy La Salle's Fort, to look for Frenchmen and to establish a mission among the Indians. All this was accomplished by De León in 1690; he burned what was left of Fort St. Louis, he recovered the survivors of La Salle's company, and with the help of Padre Manzanet he established the Mission San Francisco de los Tejas. This settlement was short lived, being abandoned in 1693. Its exact locality is not known, but Professor Garrison says that it was somewhere between the Trinity and the Neches, about forty-five miles in a southwesterly direction from the present town of Nacogdoches.

In 1691 there was another expedition under Captain Domingo Terán and Padre Manzanet, which reached the country of the Cadodachos, but returned to Mexico without establishing any mission. It was the expedition beyond the Rio Grande in search of La Salle's settlement that gave

the region its present name, Texas, a Tejas Indian word, for in the Texas country the Mission San Francisco had been founded. The official Spanish name, Nuevas Filipinas, gave way, after some time, to that of Texas.

Louis XIV, after La Salle's unfortunate expedition in 1684, made no attempt for several years to colonize Louisiana. He made war against a European coalition until the treaty of Ryswick in 1697, and it was only in October, 1698, that Iberville started from Brest to settle Louisiana. The settlement was accomplished with great difficulty. Iberville died in 1706, leaving his brother Bienville to struggle against innumerable obstacles. In 1712 Antoine Crozat, a wealthy merchant, received the grant of Louisiana for fifteen years, with exclusive right to trade and with permission to open and work mines, yielding to the king the fourth part of the gold and silver and the tenth part of all other metals.

The territory of which the exclusive commerce was granted to Crozat was described as being comprised in part between Old and New Mexico, and Carolina. Louis XIV, therefore, included within Louisiana the entire territory of what is now Texas. His surrender, for fifteen years, to one of his subjects of an immense province, was due to the exhausted condition of France, brought about by the war of the Spanish Succession. In 1700, Charles II, the last King of Spain of the house of Austria, had died, and had left heir to his Empire the grandson of Louis XIV, the Duke of Anjou, known as Philip V. The French monarch had accepted the magnificent inheritance, and after a terrible struggle with the greater part of Europe, had succeeded in establishing the sovereignty of Philip over Spain and the Spanish possessions in the New World. We have already referred to these events in regard to their influence on Mexican history, and they concern also the history of Texas. It was the weakness of the Spaniards in the latter half of the seventeenth century, during the reign of the incompetent Charles II, that had prevented their colonizing