ed.

"Then there was a great fight among the Pale-face band, in which many
were slain; but the young man and some other braves escaped from their
enemies, and, after two moons, reached the Arkansas, where they found
their friends and some Makota Conayas (priests--black-gowns). The
remainder of the band who left us, and who murdered their chief, our
ancestors destroyed like reptiles, for they were venomous and bad. The
other half of the Pale-faces, who had remained behind in their wood
wigwams, followed our tribe to our great villages, became Comanches, and
took squaws. Their children and grandchildren have formed a good and
brave nation; they are paler than the Comanches, but their heart is all
the same; and often in the hunting-grounds they join our hunters,
partake of the same meals, and agree like brothers. These are the
nation of the Wakoes, not far in the south, upon the trail of the Cross
Timbers. But who knows not the Wakoes?--even children can go to their
hospitable lodges."

This episode is historical. In the early months of 1684, four vessels
left La Rochelle, in France, for the colonisation of the Mississippi,
bearing two hundred and eighty persons. The expedition was commanded by
La Salle, who brought with him his nephew, Moranget. After a delay at
Santo Domingo, which lasted two years, the expedition, missing the mouth
of the Mississippi, entered the Bay of Matagorda, where they were
shipwrecked. "There," says Bancroft in his History of America, "under
the suns of June, with timber felled in an inland grove, and dragged for
a league over the prairie grass, the colonists prepared to build a
shelter, La Salle being the architect, and himself making the beams, and
tenons, and mortises."

This is the settlement which made Texas a part of Louisiana, La Salle
proposed to seek the Mississippi in the canoes of the Indians, who had
shewed themselves friendly, and, after an absence of about four months,
and the loss of thirty men, he returned in rags, having failed to find
"the fatal river." The eloquent American historian gives him a noble
character:--"On the return of La Salle," says he, "he learned that a
mutiny had broken out among his men, and they had destroyed a part of
the colony's provisions. Heaven and man seemed his enemies, and, with
the giant energy of an indomitable will, having lost his hopes of
fortune, his hopes of fame, with his colony diminished to about one
hundred, among whom discon