MUCH has been made of LaSalle and Marquette and justly so, for their part in the French history of the Illinois and Mississippi val-leys, but each had a loyal companion, who in their own way, left a rich legacy of history and tc,il as did Marquette, companion to Joliet, and LaSalle companion to Tonti. Each travelled thousands of miles through out the great valleys of what is now the richest part of central America in one trip after another.

Take first the case of Tonti, known to the Indians as the man with the "Iron Hand", who did not hesitate, when necessity demanded it, to use it, on the person of the refractory Indians to keep them in line, with his orders or those of LaSalle. Literally it was an iron hand. He had lost the original in battle in Europe before he met LaSalle in France and attached himself to that gentleman of France for the balance of the life Qf LaSalle.

Where Tonti was born is not certain. Some historians maintain he was a native of Italy, others lean to the belief he was a native of France. He has~been mentioned many times in the chapter the "Gentleman of France." Now we find him in part command of Fort St. Louis in the spring of 1684. Rumors came through the wilderness that the Iroquois were once again en route to "drink the blood and eat the flesh of the Illinois" as they had done in September 1680.

This time they met a Tartar in Tonti, who had no love and little respect for these blood thirsty devils, from the east. Tonti and his co-commander, de Baugy, were ready for the attack. It came March 21, 1684 and lasted six days. The roar of Indian battle resounded over the wide Illinois and through the timber land where the first of the spring wild flowers were peering through the swampy muck of the sodden hill sides. The Iroquois were beaten back nursing their wounds and probably carrying their dead and injured, with them to prevent their desecration or torture by the warriors of the Illini and their allies.

Tonti was called to Quebec and was told that he was to command Fort St. Louis. On his return he found the Illinois and the Miami about ready to swing the war clubs at each other. That trouble required settling, which may have been done with the aid of the "Iron Hand" in a literal sense.

Worried now by the non-appearance of LaSalle at Fort St. Louis, Tonti set out for the Gulf of Mexico, 1000 miles away to find his lost companion. That was a fruitless piece of work on his part, which lasted from April to early September 1686. He left a letter for LaSalle, which was given to a chief of the Mougoulockes, a tribe that lived 100 miles above modern New Orleans.

The survivors of LaSalle's ill fated expedition from France, which was to found a colony for him, had deceived Tonti on their arrival at Fort St. Louis. They told Tonti that LaSalle still lived, when in fact he had been murdered. They stayed the winter, after which Tonti and he loaned them 700 francs to get back to France. It was not until the fall of 1688, that Tonti learned the bitter truth about LaSalle and the manner of his death. It was December 1689, when he made another trip down the Mississippi in vain, again, to find the killers of his lost chief. He was gone then until September, 1690.

Tonti was commander of Fort St. Louis from 1690 to 1698 and con-trolled the key post in the colonial dreams of LaSalle as said by Mon-signor Thomas A. Meehan S. J. in his booklet, "Man with the Iron Hand".

He had little money and less influence at Ihe court of France, but con-tinually tried to stir interest in official circles and among the people of France to found colonies in the Mississippi valley.

He made a notary account in 1693 to his partner, LaForest, for 3,893 livres (French currency) in good beaver at the current prices within two years. He hired voyageurs to carr" supplies to Fort St. Louis and bring back the furs gathered by the Indians and French trappers.

The edict of the King of France in 1691 said that white men were pro-hibited from trading west of Montreal, but Tonti and LaForest were ex-cepted from the order. But their trade was so restricted by the royal order as to leave them little profit. Tonti spent the last four years of his life in the Mississippi gulf coast, where D'Iberville had founded his French colony. His death there was from fever in 1704.

Of the greatness of Tonti, Monsignor Meehan wrote; "He was possibly one of the greatest and most unselfish men who ever trod the soil of Illinois. He was loved, feared and respected by the Indians. He had en-durance that few men had, and absolute fearlessness and bravery was a counterpart of him. He was loyal to LaSalle and later to the point of death to D'Iberville. Finally, as testimony shows, he had deeply religious convictions. Few men in history have had so many admirable qualities to such a high degree.

Some idea of what his contemporaries thought of him is gleaned from a letter of Father St. Cosme. "He is the man who knows best these regions; he has twice gone down to the sea, he has been far inland to the most remote tribes and is beloved and feared everywhere. If it be desired to have discoveries made in this country I don't think the task could be provided to a more experienced man." That is the case for Tonti, who knew the wilderness as did few men of his time. Now for that of his predecessor Louis Jolliet, as he spelled his name.

Unlike the other French explorers and priests, who wrote so much history in the Illinois valley, he was a native of North America. His birthplace was near Quebec, September 1645 and at 10 he was a student in a Jesuit school. His minor orders as a Jesuit were conferred by Bishop Laval in 1662, but like LaSalle and Marquette, the hum drum life of a priest in a little town was not for him. He spent a year or so in France, then next appears at the Soo in Michigan in June 1671, in a ceremony complete with Indians, priests, soldiers and a handful of government dig-nitaries of Canada, when the north country was'claimed for France be-fore LaSalle did the same 1,500 miles to the south on the Gulf coast.

A year later, Joliet was commissioned by Talon of the Canadian royal government, to start search for the Mississippi and its mouth. That led to his hook up with Marquette, the young Jesuit missionary, who had been stationed in what is now Northern Michigan.

Their voyages up and down the Illinois and the founding of the lir~t Christian Mission at Utica by Marquette in 1675 have been told.

After the death of Marquette, Joliet was married the same year and settled down to go into business and raise a family near Quebec. His eldest son was born in 1676. His petition to go back to the Illinois valley on a voyage of exploration was denied by the royal government. But in 1689 he was mapping the wilderness of the Labrodarian coast. He also mapped the Gulf of St. Lawrence at the order of the French government as an aid to navigation. His death was in 1700 and his burial place is unknown.

Joliet found the valley of the Illinois, a beautiful place filled with game and fish, where he believed it would be easy for settlers to make their living; of the valley he wrote:

"The river which we have christened St. Louis rises near the lower end of the lake of the Illinois (Lake Michigan) and seemed to me the most beautiful and most suitable for settlement.

"At the place where we entered the lake is a harbor convenient for receiving vessels and sheltering them from the wind. The river is wide and deep abounding in catfish and sturgeon.

"For the distance of 80 leagues, not a quarter hour passes without seeing game, which is abundant in these parts, oxen, cows, stags, does and turkeys are fdund there in much greater numbers than elsewhere.

"There are prairies 3, 6, 10 and 20 leagues long and three wide sur-rounded by forests of the same extent, beyond these the prairies begin again, so that there is much of one sort of land as of the other. Some of the grass is very short, some grows as high as six feet, hemp grows wild here and reaches a height of eight feet.

"A settler would not have to spend 10 years cutting and burning trees. On the very day of his arrival he could put his plow into the ground. And if he had no oxen from France, he could use those of this country or even on which western Indians ride, as we do on horses. After sowing grains of all kinds a settler could devote himself to planting trees and grafting fruit trees, to tanning hides, with which to make shoes and with the wool of the oxen (buffalo) he could make finer clothes than that brought from France.

"Thus he could easily find in the country, his food and his clothing and nothing could be wanting except salt; however by taking proper steps it should not be difficult to remedy that deficiency."

It was Joliet, with the trained eye of the explorer and the map makers, who with Marquette, first saw the possibilities of a waterway, that woulci link the Great Lakes with the Father of Waters, far to the west. Of it he wrote: "We could easily sail ships to Florida. All that needs to be done is to dig a canal through half a league of prairie from the lower end of Lake Michigan to the river of St. Louis-which empties into the Missis-sippi, which the ship could easily descend to the Gulf of Mexico.

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