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Before a territory can be settled, it has to be explored. Through an exquisite quest, amongst adventure and hardships, Sir Rene Robert Cavalier de La Salle set out to explore the Great Lakes and Mississippi River. In the winter of 1681 - 1682, the French explorer Rene Robert Cavalier, Sir de la Salle, led an expedition from Canada down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. La Salle reached the river's outlet to the gulf, where he set up a cross and a wooden post carved with the coat of arms of his king, Louis XIV. In the presence of a handful of followers, the thirty-nine-year old explorer claimed the entire Mississippi watershed for France, and named the new territory "Louisiana. " His goals were to chart the lands for claims and settlement of his beloved France.
Unfortunately, not all explorers achieve success, and hardships come with the tide. La Salle returned to French Canada, then set sail for France to seek the king's support for a scheme to fortify and colonize the Mississippi valley and the Gulf Coast. Arriving in Paris, LaSalle presented the royal court with a glowing description of the settlement potential of the great river valley, emphasizing that he had already "made five journeys of more than five thousand leagues through unknown country, largely on foot, among savages and cannibals, " all in the name of his sovereign. " (Cox) The most forceful point in La Salle's presentation to the king was a proposal to challenge Spanish control of the Gulf of Mexico. The king of Spain had issued a territorial decree barring the ships of other nations from entering the gulf. Some French ships that had ventured into the forbidden waters had been attacked and had their crews imprisoned or enslaved by the Spanish.
At the same time, the fame of Spanish silver mines in northern Mexico provided a strong incentive for the French to invade the region and claim its treasures. La Salle proposed to lead an invasion force to seize the Spanish mining settlements and begin the French colonization of the Gulf Coast. The many Indian tribes of the region, he assured the king would "become good French subjects, so that, without drawing any considerable number of men from Europe, they will form a powerful colony, with enough troops to act in any emergency. " (Cox) La Salle asked for two fully equipped ships with which to return to the Gulf Coast. Impressed by the explorer's ambition, the king gave him four. Two warships, the Aimable and the Joly, were outfitted for the expedition, along with a supply ship, La Belle, and a small ketch, the St.
Francois. The expedition was placed under La Salle's direction, but command of the ships was given to an experienced naval captain named Beaujeu. La Salle objected to this chain-of-command, and soon began to quarrel with Beaujeu over the details of the planned journey. Beaujeu, whose only responsibility was to get the four ships safely across the Atlantic, tolerated La Salle's incessant arguments, sarcastically confiding in his correspondence that "I will humor him, even to sailing my ship on dry land, if he likes. " (Parkman) By order of the king, 200 French soldiers were recruited to accompany the explorer. Another 200 colonists, including craftsmen, families and single young girls volunteered to populate the proposed colony. At last, equipped with all the weapons, food, and other supplies that La Salle had requested, the fleet sailed out of the harbor of La Rochelle on July 24, 1684.
The two-month Atlantic crossing was plagued by stormy weather and disagreements between La Salle and Beaujeu, and ended with the capture of the lagging ketch St. Francois by Spanish pirates in the Caribbean Sea. Early in September, the three remaining ships put in at the French-controlled port of Haiti, where La Salle and many of his followers became seriously ill. For three months, while the invalids recovered, the remainder of the crew spent their time carousing in the taverns and brothels of Port Au Prince. "The air of that place, " wrote one member of the expedition, "is bad, so are the fruits, and there are plenty of women worse than either. " Another later recorded that "the soldiers and most of the crew, having plunged into every kind of debauchery and intemperance, so common in those parts, were so ruined and contracted with dangerous disorders that some died on the island, and others never recovered. " In December, 1684, wary of merciless Spanish buccaneers, the French expedition left Haiti and sailed into the Gulf of Mexico.
With no charts, the three remaining French ships accidentally bypassed the marshy delta of the Mississippi and continued westward. Coasting along the shore of what is now eastern Texas, La Salle and his men looked for signs of the great river's main outlet, but saw only a low, unbroken shoreline. One morning, after passing through a dense fog, the Joly, commanded by Beaujeu, became separated from La Belle and the Aimable, with La Salle on board. When the ships were reunited, the two men immediately blamed each other for the separation and then began to debate their true position on the unmapped coast. La Salle sent a scouting party ashore to explore along the beach, while the ships followed offshore, sailing cautiously through the dangerously shallow coastal waters. Leading the scouts along the shore were Joutel, a French army veteran who had come from La Salle's home town of Rouen, and Moran get, one of La Salle's nephews.
After weeks of fruitless searching along the Gulf Coast, the reconnaissance party and the three ships came to Matagorda Bay, midway between modern Houston and Corpus Christi, Texas. La Salle hopefully proclaimed that they had found the western outlet of the Mississippi, the first goal of the expedition. In fact, the expedition had missed its mark by nearly 300 miles; the river that LaSalle mistook for the Mississippi was the Lavaca River at the head of the bay. La Salle instructed a work party to cut down a large tree and fashion a dugout canoe for further exploration of the river.
While at work on the canoe, six of the eight crewmen were captured by local Indians and carried off. La Salle quickly assembled a rescue party, which was met on the beach by a group of natives who, according to the veteran Joutel, "gave us to understand that they had a friendship for us, which they expressed by laying their hands on their hearts, and we did the same on our parts... M. La Salle gave them some knives, hatchets and other trifles, with which they seemed well pleased, and went away. " (Parkman) The rescue party followed the Indians back to their village, which consisted "of about fifty cottages made of rush mats, and others of dried skins.
With most of the savages sitting around them as if they were upon the watch. " (Parkman) Just as the heavily armed Frenchmen entered the Indian village, a cannon thundered from offshore. The captain of the Aimable had accidentally run his ship aground on a sandbar, and had fired the shot to summon La Salle back to the beach. At the sound of the cannon, the startled Indian villagers "all fell flat upon the ground" (Parkman) and quickly released the hostages they had taken. La Salle rushed back to the grounded ship, which was rocking back and forth on the sandbar as the waves broke against her collapsing hull. Whatever could be saved from the wreck was drug ashore, where guards were posted to deter Indian looters.
Lost at the bottom of the bay were the bulk of the expedition's tools, cannon balls and untapped wine kegs. Over the next few days, under La Salle's direction, a settlement was built on the shore. A driftwood palisade was pieced together, and crude shelters were built inside this enclosure by some of the colonists. Dysentery soon broke out in the encampment, killing several colonists.
Dealings with the local Indians began smoothly enough, but soon went bad after a dispute over the ownership of some blankets taken from the wreck of the Aimable. The Indians began to harass the French settlement, setting brush fires outside its rampart, firing volleys of arrows into the fort and killing soldiers who camped in the open. Having accomplished his mission, Captain Beaujeu set sail for France in the Joly when the new settlement was less than two months old. He left La Salle with only one ship, La Belle, and its provisions to sustain his colony.
A few weeks after the Joly departed, La Salle moved his colony to a new location, a short distance inland from the mouth of the Lavaca River, where they would be hidden from the Spanish warships that patrolled the coast. He named this new settlement "Fort St. Louis. " An account of the settlement relates; "For a month, La Salle made them work in cultivating the ground; but neither the grain nor the vegetables sprouted, either because they were damaged by the salt water or because, as was afterward remarked, it was not the right season. The maladies which the soldiers had contracted in Haiti were visibly carrying them off, and a hundred died in a few days. " (Cox) Through that summer and fall of 1685, the settlement eked out a marginal subsistence. Fishing and hunting, along with improved luck in growing crops, fed the dwindling number of French soldiers and colonists. Periodic Indian attacks kept the fort in a perpetual state of alert.
La Salle's soldiers were ambushed by Indians who vanished into the backwoods when confronted. The Indians prowled outside the fort by night, "howling like wolves. " (Cox) La Salle spent much of his time e...
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