his mind was of a different temper. He had no thought but to grapple with
adversity, and out of the fragments of his ruin to rear the fabric of a
triumphant success.

He would not recoil; but he modified his plans to meet the new
contingency. His white enemies had found, or rather perhaps had made, a
savage ally in the Iroquois. Their incursions must be stopped, or his
enterprise would come to nought; and he thought he saw the means by which
this new danger could be converted into a source of strength. The tribes
of the West, threatened by the common enemy, might be taught to forget
their mutual animosities, and join in a defensive league, with La Salle at
its head. They might be colonized around his fort in the valley of the
Illinois, where, in the shadow of the French flag, and with the aid of
French allies, they could hold the Iroquois in check, and acquire, in some
measure, the arts of a settled life. The Franciscan friars could teach
them the faith; and La Salle and his associates could supply them with
goods, in exchange for the vast harvest of furs which their hunters could
gather in these boundless wilds. Meanwhile, he would seek out the mouth of
the Mississippi; and the furs gathered at his colony in the Illinois would
then find a ready passage to the markets of the world. Thus might this
ancient slaughter-field of warring savages be redeemed to civilization and
Christianity; and a stable settlement, half-feudal, half-commercial, grow
up in the heart of the western wilderness. The scheme was but a new
feature, the result of new circumstances, added to the original plan of
his great enterprise; and he addressed himself to its execution with his
usual vigor, and with an address which never failed him in his dealings
with Indians.

There were allies close at hand. Near Fort Miami were the huts of twenty-
five or thirty savages, exiles from their homes, and strangers in this