The name is absent

166         Marcel Moraud

repaired to the place “where the wretched dead corpse lay,
which they barbarously stripped even to the shirt, and then
vented their malice in vile and opprobrious language. The
surgeon, Liotot, said several times in scorn and derision,
‘There thou liest, great pacha; there thou liest.^f Finally
they dragged it naked along the bushes and left it exposed
to the ravenous wild beasts. So far was it from what a cer-
tain author writes of their having buried him and set up
a cross on his grave.” In these words I am afraid we have
the naked and brutal truth.

Thus died at the age of 43, in the prime of his life, the
man who had completed the discovery of the Mississippi
and attempted the first European settlement on the shores
of Texas. Pages and pages have been written trying to ex-
plain why he was murdered, many reasons have been ad-
vanced; his severity to his men, the resentment of one of the
murderers for the loss of his brother for which he blamed
de La Salle, their fear of meeting him after murdering his
nephew. Tonti, the lieutenant, and one of the most faithful
followers of de La Salle, has one sentence which in its terse-
ness and simplicity is more eloquent than whole chapters.
“In long journeys there are always discontented people.”
I believe that therein lies the secret of de La Salle’s murder.
He was asking for more than can be expected from men.
There comes a time when human endurance will go no
further unless it is sustained by some inner power, the re-
ligious faith of missionaries, or the great vision of de La
Salle.

His story is one of the sad tales which had to be written
in blood on the soil of this huge country before it could be
developed—and once more we revert to the words of Kipling:

Then the wood failed, then the food failed, then the last water dried,
In the faith of little children we lay down and died.

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