Cavelier de La Salle, 1684-1687 167
The fate of de La Salle is a more tragic one, as we might add :
“Then human endurance failed, then human loyalty failed.”
It is not without grandeur. He died at his post as an ex-
plorer, and in the fulfillment of his mission.
“It was in the order of Providence,” wrote his great ad-
mirer, John Quincy Adams, “that he should not live to ac-
complish the whole of his undertaking but that he should so
nearly accomplish it as to place it beyond the powers of
events, that it should perish with him.”
Two hundred and fifty years have passed and de La Salle
still remains a great figure, as an explorer of this continent,
and as the man who wrote some splendid pages in the his-
tory of the United States, and some of the earliest and yet
most vivid pages in the history of Texas.
Marcel Moraud.