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 While La Salle was vainly struggling to accomplish the end for which he had sailed to Louisiana, the French were not idle in the North. In the rich peltries of the far West the fur-traders found a source of wealth rivaling even the mines of the South, and a class of men—unique alike in their manners and their experiences—sprang up, as it were, in the heart of the wilderness, to whom the name of coureurs des bois was given. These rangers of the woods seem to have left behind them the European prejudice against the natives, and in their wild expeditions in remote tracts, and among distant tribes, they adopted the Indian mode of dress, contracted marriages with "squaws," and brought up their half-caste children to lead a life differing but slightly, if at all, from that of their mothers' relations. The usual result followed: the natives copied the vices of their visitors without their virtues, and but for the missionaries, who settled wherever there seemed to be a hope of winning even a few souls to God, natives and settlers would have been involved in one common ruin, alike of body and soul.

ASSASSINATION OF LA SALLE.

Little by little the traders and missionaries penetrated as far north as Hudson's Bay, and as far west as the Saskatchewan, the shores of which