Rene-Robert Cavalier Sieur
De La Salle
Rene-Robert Cavalier Sieur De La Salle
b. 1643 Roeun,
France d. 1687 Texas Territory
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The Jesuit-educated son of a wealthy French merchant, La Salle sailed to
Montreal
at the
age of 23. There he secured a land grant, but becoming restless, he sold it
after only three years to finance an expedition of his own.
La Salle had
taken care to learn the Iroquois language as well as several other local
dialects
(languages). From
the Indians who arrived in
Montreal
every spring to trade hides and pelts for trinkets and firearms he heard
talk of a mighty river called the
Ohio
that flowed south to the sea. La Salle thought it might empty into the
Gulf of
California
and provide
a valuable new route to the Orient
(Far East).
He joined
a company of missionaries bound for the
Great Lakes, but
soon struck out with a few men to find the
Ohio River
. He spent the
next few years exploring the land and rivers south of the lakes. In 1673,
after
Louis Joliet
and Jacques
Marquette had explored enough
of the
Mississippi
to determine that it flowed into the
Gulf of Mexico,
La Salle and the governor of New France together proposed to build a string of
forts and trading posts along the
Great Lakes
and surrounding rivers to ensure that the fur traded in these parts would all
belong to the French crown.
La Salle
made two trips back to his homeland, where he received his title from the
court of
Louis XIV
and struck a
deal, that not only made him governor of the American West, but also gave him
a monopoly on trade exchange for maintaining the needed forts. He returned
from his second trip accompanied by a young lieutenant named Henri de Tonti,
with whom he sailed down the
Illinois
and
Mississippi
rivers,
reaching the delta in early April. They fired their muskets, and then La Salle
formally took possession for
France
the entire
watershed of the Mississippi and its tributaries, and named the territory
Louisiana
after his king.
In 1684
La Salle returned from a third trip to
France
with more than 200 colonists to establish a settlement at the mouth of the
Mississippi.
Wildly overshooting , he landed instead at Matagorda Bay on the
Texas
coast. Over the next three years he made unsuccessful attempts to find the
Mississippi
by sea. Then in 1887 he returned to look for it by land. Soon after setting
out uncertainly from Matagorda, he came to grief at the hands of his
followers.
Below are links and sites for more information on Rene-Robert
Cavalier, Sieur De La Salle
This site was last updated
08/04/2004 08:08 PM -0400
The Jesuit-educated son of a wealthy French merchant, La Salle sailed to
Montreal
at the
age of 23. There he secured a land grant, but becoming restless, he sold it
after only three years to finance an expedition of his own.