“Now these two warriors our great chief had spoken of were bad men and very greedy; they were ambitious too, and believed that, by killing their chief and his son, they would themselves command the band.  One evening, while they were all eating the meal of friendship, groans were heard—­a murder had been committed.  The other warriors sprang up; they saw their chief dead, and the two warriors coming towards them; their revenge was quick—­quick as that of the panther:  the two base warriors were killed.

“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 colonization 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 showed 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 discontent had given birth to plans of crime—­with no European nearer than the river Pamuco, and no French nearer than the northern shores of the Mississippi, he resolved to travel on foot to his countrymen in the North, and renew his attempts at colonization.”