René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle

René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle (born November 22, 1643, Rouen, France—died March 19, 1687, near Brazos River [now in Texas, U.S.]) was a French explorer in North America who led an expedition down the Illinois and Mississippi rivers and claimed all the region watered by the Mississippi and its tributaries for Louis XIV of France, naming the region “Louisiana.” A few years later, in a luckless expedition seeking the mouth of the Mississippi, he was murdered by his men.

Early life

La Salle was educated at a Jesuit college. He first studied for the priesthood, but at the age of 22 he found himself more attracted to adventure and exploration and in 1666 set out for Canada to seek his fortune. With a grant of land at the western end of Île de Montréal, La Salle acquired at one stroke the status of a seigneur (i.e., landholder) and the opportunities of a frontiersman.

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Exploration and Discovery

The young landlord farmed his land near the Lachine Rapids and, at the same time, set up a fur-trading outpost. Through contact with the Indians who came to sell their pelts, he learned various Indian dialects and heard stories of the lands beyond the settlements. He soon became obsessed with the idea of finding a way to the Orient through the rivers and lakes of the Western frontier.

If experience modified the visions of the dreamer, it enhanced the knowledge and skill of the pathfinder and trader. Having sold his land, La Salle set out in 1669 to explore the Ohio region. His discovery of the Ohio River, however, is not accepted by modern historians.

La Salle found a kindred spirit in the Count de Frontenac, the “Fighting Governor” of New France (the French possessions in Canada) from 1672 to 1682. Together, they pursued a policy of extending French military power by establishing a fort on Lake Ontario (Fort-Frontenac), holding the Iroquois in check, and intercepting the fur trade between the Upper Lakes and the Dutch and English coastal settlements.

Their plans were strongly opposed by the Montreal merchants, who feared the loss of their trade, and by the missionaries (especially the Jesuits), who were afraid of losing their influence over the Indians of the interior. Nevertheless, Fort-Frontenac was built where Kingston now stands, and La Salle was installed there as seigneur in 1675 after a visit to the French court, as Frontenac’s representative. The governor had recommended him as “a man of intelligence and ability, more capable than anybody else I know here to accomplish every kind of enterprise and discovery.…” Louis XIV was sufficiently impressed by him to grant him a title of nobility.

Attempts to expand New France

At Fort-Frontenac, La Salle had control of a large share of the fur trade, and his affairs prospered. But his restless ambition drove him to seek greater ends. On another visit to France in 1677 he obtained from the king authority to explore “the western parts of New France” and permission to build as many forts as he wished, as well as to hold a valuable monopoly of the trade in buffalo hides.

Since the project had to be carried out at his own expense, however, he borrowed large sums in both Paris and Montreal, and he began to be enmeshed in a tangle of debts that was to blight all of his later enterprises. La Salle’s proposals also roused still further the enmity of the Jesuits, who resolutely opposed all his schemes.

When he returned to Canada in 1678, La Salle was accompanied by an Italian soldier of fortune, Henri de Tonty, who became his most loyal friend and ally. Early in the following year, he built the “Griffon,” the first commercial sailing vessel on Lake Erie, which he hoped would pay for an expedition into the interior as far as the Mississippi. From the Seneca Indians above the Niagara Falls he learned how to make long journeys overland, on foot in any season, subsisting on game and a small bag of corn. His trek from Niagara to Fort-Frontenac in the dead of winter won the admiration of a normally critical member of his expeditions, the friar Louis Hennepin.

La Salle’s great scheme of carrying cargo in sailing vessels like the “Griffon” on the lakes and down the Mississippi was frustrated by the wreck of that ship and by the destruction and desertion of Fort-Crèvecoeur on the Illinois River, where a second ship was being built in 1680. Proud and unyielding by nature, La Salle tried to bend others to his will and often demanded too much of them, though he was no less hard on himself. After several disappointments, he at last reached the junction of the Illinois with the Mississippi and saw for the first time the river he had dreamed of for so long. But he had to deny himself the chance to explore it. Hearing that Tonty and his party were in danger, he turned back to aid them.

After many vicissitudes, La Salle and Tonty succeeded in canoeing down the Mississippi and reached the Gulf of Mexico. There, on April 9, 1682, the explorer proclaimed the whole Mississippi basin for France and named it Louisiana. In name, at least, he acquired for France the most fertile half of the North American continent.

The following year La Salle built Fort-Saint-Louis at Starved Rock on the Illinois River (now a state park), and here he organized a colony of several thousand Indians. To maintain the new colony, he sought help from Quebec, but Frontenac had been replaced by a governor hostile to La Salle’s interests, and La Salle received orders to surrender Fort-Saint-Louis. He refused and left North America to appeal directly to the king. Welcomed in Paris, La Salle was given an audience with Louis XIV, who favoured him by commanding the governor to make full restitution of La Salle’s property.

Last expedition

The last phase of his extraordinary career centred on his proposal to fortify the mouth of the Mississippi and to invade and conquer part of the Spanish province of Mexico. He planned to accomplish all this with some 200 Frenchmen, aided by buccaneers and an army of 15,000 Indians—a venture that caused his detractors to question his sanity. But the king saw a chance to harass the Spaniards, with whom he was at war, and approved the project, giving La Salle men, ships, and money.

The expedition was doomed from the start. It had hardly left France when quarrels arose between La Salle and the naval commander. Vessels were lost by piracy and shipwreck, while sickness took a heavy toll of the colonists. Finally, a gross miscalculation brought the ships to Matagorda Bay in Texas, 500 miles west of their intended landfall. After several fruitless journeys in search of his lost Mississippi, La Salle met his death at the hands of mutineers near the Brazos River. His vision of a French empire died with him.

La Salle provoked much controversy both in his own lifetime and later. Those who knew him best praised his ability unsparingly. He was considered “one of the greatest men of the age” by Tonty, who, like Frontenac, was among the very few who were able to understand the proud spirit of the dour Norman. Henri Joutel, who served under La Salle through the tragic days of the Texas colony until his death, wrote both of his fine qualities and of his insufferable arrogance toward his subordinates. In Joutel’s view, this arrogance was the true cause of La Salle’s death.

Undoubtedly, La Salle was hampered by faults of character and lacked the qualities of leadership. On the other hand, he possessed prodigious vision, tenacity, and courage. His claim of Louisiana for France, though but a vain boast at the time, pointed the way to the French colonial empire that was eventually built by other men.