It was reserved for La Salle to furnish the proof.

He was provokingly delayed, by one misfortune after another, but at last got his expedition under way at the end of the year 1681.

In the dead of winter he and Henri de Tonty, son of Lorenzo Tonty, who invented the tontine, his lieutenant, started down the Illinois, with a following of eighteen Indians brought from New England, and twenty-three Frenchmen.

They moved in procession down the surface of the frozen river, on foot, and dragging their canoes after them on sledges.
At Peoria Lake they struck open water, and paddled thence to the Mississippi and turned their prows southward.

They plowed through the fields of floating ice, past the mouth of the Missouri; past the mouth of the Ohio, by-and-by; 'and, gliding by the wastes of bordering swamp, landed on the 24th of February near the Third Chickasaw Bluffs,' where they halted and built Fort Prudhomme.
'Again,' says Mr.Parkman, 'they embarked; and with every stage of their adventurous progress, the mystery of this vast new world was more and more unveiled.