clearly impracticable, the subsequent experience of the French in Texas
tended to prove that the tribes of that region could be used with
advantage in attacking the Spaniards of Mexico, and that an inroad, on a
comparatively small scale, might have been successfully made with their
help. In 1689, Tonty actually made the attempt, as we shall see, but
failed from the desertion of his men. In 1697, the Sieur de Louvigny wrote
to the Minister of the Marine, asking to complete La Salle's discoveries,
and invade Mexico from Texas.--_Lettre de M. de Louvigny_, 14 _Oct._ 1697,
MS. In an unpublished memoir of the year 1700, the seizure of the Mexican
mines is given as one of the motives of the colonization of Louisiana.]

La Salle's immediate necessity was to obtain from the court the means for
establishing a fort and a colony within the mouth of the Mississippi. This
was essential to his own commercial plans; nor did he in the least
exaggerate the value of such an establishment to the French nation, and
the importance of anticipating other powers in the possession of it. But
he needed a more glittering lure to attract the eyes of Louis and
Seignelay; and thus, it would appear, he held before them, in a definite
and tangible form, the project of Spanish conquest which had haunted his
imagination from youth, trusting that the speedy conclusion of peace,
which actually took place, would absolve him from the immediate execution
of the scheme, and give him time, with the means placed at his disposal,
to mature his plans and prepare for eventual action. Such a procedure may
be charged with indirectness; but it was in accordance with the wily and
politic element from which the iron nature of La Salle was not free, but
which was often defeated in its aims by other elements of his character.

Even with this madcap enterprise lopped off, La Salle's scheme of
Mississippi trade and colonization, perfectly sound in itself, was too
vast for an individual; above all, for one crippled and crushed with debt.