Return to Old News homepageby Paul Chrastina
In the winter of 1681-1682, the French explorer Rene Robert Cavalier, Sieur 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."
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.
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 miningsettlements 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."
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."
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, and 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 Moranget, 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." 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."
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" 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 dragged 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."
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."
La Salle spent much of his time exploring the hinterland of the Lavaca River, still hoping that it was really an outlet of the Mississippi. Finally, conceding that he had settled on the wrong river, he decided to try to find the Mississippi by hiking east along the coast, with the help of the ship La Belle sailing offshore.
La Salle selected twenty soldiers to accompany him. On October 31, 1685, the group set off with their weapons, provisions, and Indian trade goods slung from their backs. Other soldiers, commanded by the veteran Joutel, remained at Fort St. Louis to protect the civilian colonists.
La Salle's land party soon lost sight of La Belle and proceeded northeast, following the coast and crossing the lower reaches of the Colorado, Brazos, and Trinity rivers of east Texas. The party encountered numerous Indian tribes. The chiefs of the Texas tribes all said that they hated the Spanish and that they were receptive to the idea of a war against the conquistadors.
The group made steady progress, covering about 150 miles on foot, until it reached an area near the Sabine River, the present Texas-Louisiana border. At this point, La Salle, his nephew Moranget and three soldiers all fell violently ill after consuming large amounts of "certain unfamiliar fruits." Still over 100 miles short of the Mississippi, the expedition was forced to encamp for two months while the men recovered. Finally, running low on gunpowder and other supplies, La Salle retreated toward his settlement on the Lavaca River.
As the group headed back toward Fort St. Louis, they buried caches of food and other goods along the way, with hopes of making another attempt to reach the Mississippi in the future. Of the twenty soldiers originally in the party, four men deserted to live with Indians, five were lost and were presumed dead, and one, while crossing the Colorado river, was "carried off, with his raft, by a crocodile of prodigious length and bulk."
When La Salle got back to Fort St. Louis on March 31, 1686, he was informed by Joutel that the last remaining ship, La Belle, had been wrecked by its drunken captain on the far side of the bay, with the loss of nearly all the crew and supplies. Of the nearly 400 souls who had left France two years before, only about 45 now remained to defeat the Spanish, dominate the natives, and colonize greater '"Louisiana."
For the next nine months, according to La Salle's brother, Abbe Cavelier, the soldiers and settlers of Fort St. Louis turned their hopes to "the aid that the King might send us from France.... banished, as it were, to the uttermost parts of the earth."
By the end of 1686, the last chance for the survival of the colony was for La Salle to locate the Mississippi River and to make his way to French fur-trading outposts that he knew lay further north. In early January, 1687, La Salle left Fort St. Louis with a party of the most able-bodied colonists; these included his brother Abbe Cavalier, his two nephews Moranget and Cavelier, the veteran Joutel, Father Douay, and an Indian guide named Nika. The infirm, the women and the children stayed in the settlement, where they were watched over by three priests, a handful of soldiers, and a surgeon.
LaSalle's group was slowed by heavy winter rains as it made its way across the prairies of eastern Texas, lodging at the villages of friendly Indian tribes. Two months after leaving Fort St. Louis, the group began to run low on provisions. La Salle sent some men ahead to locate a buried cache of wheat and beans that he had left behind on his previous journey. This group consisted of the Indian Nika; four Frenchmen named Duhaut, Teissier, L'Archeveque and Liotot; a German buccaneer named Heins, and a servant. After finding the stored food "all rotten and quite spoiled," the Shawnee guide, Nika, succeeded in killing two buffalo. The servant was sent with this news to La Salle's camp. The next day, La Salle sent his nephew Moranget to retrieve some of the meat.
When Moranget reached the hunting party, he found that they had butchered and smoked the buffalo meat, and had set aside some of the bones and scraps for their evening meal. According to Joutel's account, Moranget became incensed at the group's daring to reserve some of the meat for their own consumption. "In a passion, he seized not only the meat that was smoked and dried, but also the bones, without giving the hunters anything." After having gone for days without food, the hunters were outraged by Moranget's unreasonable action. The group "withdrew and resolved together upon a bloody revenge; and agreed upon the manner of it." A plan was hatched to kill Moranget, Nika, and La Salle's servant.
That night, after the three men had fallen asleep, the conspirators took action. Liotot, the surgeon, Joutel relates, "was the inhuman executioner; he took an axe and began with Moranget, giving him many strokes on the head; the same he did by the servant and the Indian, killing them on the spot." With Moranget, Nika and the servant dead, the killers decided that they would now have to murder La Salle and any who were loyal to him. The next morning, according to Joutel, "They consulted about the safest method to effect it, and resolved to go together to La Salle's camp, to knock out the brains of the most resolute immediately, then it would be easier to overcome the rest."
The river which lay between the two camps was flooded, however, and so the mutineers remained in their camp for two days, well stocked with buffalo meat.
La Salle, who was expecting Moranget's return with the meat, became anxious on the third day, and decided to go in search of the missing party. On the morning of March 20, 1687, La Salle set out with Father Douay to find his nephew and the others. He left Joutel in charge of the base camp, with instructions to patrol the area "to prevent being surprised, and to make smoke signals for him to find his way back."
When La Salle reached the hunting camp, he found only a bloodstained shirt. He noticed eagles circling overhead, as if scenting carrion. Seeing no one,he fired his pistol as a signal.
The assassins, hearing the gunshot, prepared their own muzzle-loading weapons in the woods nearby. Three of them-Duhaut, L'Archeveque and Liotot-moved cautiously in the direction of the gunshot. Sighting the explorer and Father Douay in the distance, Duhaut and Liotot hid in some tall grass, stationing L'Archeveque in the open.
When La Salle saw L'Archeveque, he called to him, asking where he might find his nephew. L'Archeveque evasively answered that Moranget was "somewhere along the river." As La Salle came closer, Duhaut and Liotot opened fire and "shot La Salle through the head, so that he dropped down on the spot without speaking a word." Father Douay stood petrified with fear, but was quickly assured by Duhaut that he was not in danger.
Joutel wrote, "the shot which had killed La Salle was also a signal for the assassins to draw near. They all came to the place where the wretched corpse lay, which they barbarously stripped to the shirt, and vented their malice in vile and insulting language. The surgeon, Liotot, said several times in scorn and derision, `There thou liest, great bassa, there thou liest.' They dragged the body naked among the bushes and left it there, exposed to ravenous wild beasts."
The mutineers returned to La Salle's camp, where Duhaut proclaimed himself the new leader. He led the tattered group of survivors to a nearby Indian village. There they stayed for six weeks, debating their next move, until tensions within the fragmented group led to another episode of violence; Duhaut and Liotot were shot to death by Heins and one of the deserters.
The remaining Frenchmen decided to head northeast, and after four months' travel, in September, 1687, they reached a French outpost on the Illinois River. There they were able to borrow money and supplies in La Salle's name, claiming that the last time they had seen La Salle, he had been alive and well. The six survivors, including Joutel, Abbe Cavelier, and Father Douay, kept the news of La Salle's death a secret for over a year, until they had safely returned to France.
Meanwhile, some Spanish ships, alerted by sightings of LaSalle's wrecked ships in the bay, located the ruins of the settlement on the Lavaca River. The Spaniards learned from the Indians that the French colony had been decimated by an epidemic of smallpox, after which the remaining colonists had been slaughtered by the Indians.
SOURCES:
The Journeys of Rene Robert Cavalier Sieur de la Salle. edited by I. J. Cox. New York. 1922.
La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West. by Francis Parkman. New York. 1879.
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