March they encamped near the mouth of the
Arkansas, and three hundred miles below they were well received by the
Natchez Indians. On the 6th of April the great river divided before
them into three wide channels: La Salle followed that of the west;
Tonty took the middle course; and D'Autray descended the eastern
passage. On the 19th of April the three parties met on the Gulf of
Mexico. A cross bearing the arms of France was set up, and the country
was named Louisiana after the Grand Monarch.

The Louisiana of to-day conveys no idea of the vast tract of country
defined by La Salle's proclamation of 1682. To the explorer it meant
the extent of the mighty continent, stretching westward from the
Alleghanies to the Rockies, and north and south from Lake Superior to
the Gulf of Mexico. All former accessions of territory were small
beside it, and to his eyes it seemed the fertile Canaan of French
enterprise. Yet the very magnitude of this new success made for the
undoing of New France, by scattering her feeble forces over the length
and breadth of a continent and distending her line of defence so far
that it could be easily pierced. La Salle, however, was driven
irresistibly forward by the hot ambition which ruled him. His romantic
vision pictured a greater New France in the valley of the Mississippi,
governed by himself--a prosperous trading colony shipping cargoes of
beaver-skins directly to Europe by way of the Gulf of Mexico. Quebec,
however, was the home of his enemies. His former reverses had
shattered the faith of creditors, while the Canadian merchants envied
him the monopoly of the Western trade. They heaped calumny upon his
enterprises, labelled him a _coureur de bois_, and persistently
wrecked his schemes. Final success enabled La Salle in a measure to
disregard these annoyances; but when the new Governor, La Barre, went
the length of seizing Fort Frontenac--thus cutting off the far west
from its supplies--and even declared him an outlaw, La Salle, although
he had but lately recovered from a fever, made up his mind to carry
his cause to France.

In the spring of 1684, therefore, the weatherbeaten woodsman of the
New World stood before the throne of the Grand Monarch; and although
the Court had greater terrors for him than the Canadian forests, yet
he was able to set forth the rights of his case with the honest
boldness of a frontiersman and the force of a cultured intellect.
Louis followed his words with deepest in