by Chad Fraser
The men, led by a former French soldier named La Motte de Lucière, had sailed over a month earlier from Fort Frontenac, at the eastern end of Lake Ontario. Their small, two-masted brigantine was literally bursting with wood, rigging, and all the materials they would need to build a second, larger vessel, or barque, which they intended to sail across Lake Erie in order to open up trade with the Native tribes living in the vast interior of North America.
The first phase of the project, the construction of the barque, was extremely ambitious. Once the men sailed across Lake Ontario and into the Niagara River, they faced a back-breaking hike through the dense forest and around the mighty Niagara Falls with the ship’s cargo strapped to their backs. From there, they would select a site near Lake Erie and build a small shipyard. Only then could they get on with the business of actually building the barque.
The voyage had not started out well; La Motte’s crew had sailed from Fort Frontenac perilously late in the season, and the fierce autumn gales howled throughout the sailing, pushing the brigantine to the brink of capsize many times. Father Louis Hennepin, a missionary of the Récollet order, who travelled with the expedition, describes the sailing in his 1698 account, A new discovery of a vast country in America:
The winds and the cold of autumn were then very violent, insomuch that our crew was afraid to go in so little a vessel. This obliged us and the Sieur de la Motte, our commander, to keep our course on the north side of the lake, to shelter ourselves under the coast against the northwest wind, which otherwise would have forced us upon the southern coast . . . This voyage proved very difficult, because of the unseasonable time of year, winter being near at hand.
Farther west, while seeking shelter from the raging wind and high seas in the mouth of the Humber River, the men awoke to find the brigantine frozen in by the advancing ice. The tiny ship would certainly have been crushed to pieces if not for the crew’s desperate, and ultimately successful, bid to cut it out with axes.
Finally, on December 5, the crew’s fortunes turned for the better. The day dawned calm and clear, and the wind turned favourable for sailing. The brigantine made steady progress across the lake, arriving at the mouth of the Niagara River and making its way as far as present-day Lewiston, New York, by December 18. It was here that the crew found themselves on that miserable Christmas morning, unable to proceed any farther.
The expedition had come to a crossroads. The harsher-than-expected weather and the onset of winter had made any attempt to unload the brigantine and carry its contents around Niagara Falls impossible. So, the men decided to put their tradesmen’s skills to work; chopping down some surrounding trees, they built the small cabin, along with a surrounding palisade for defense, to wait out the weather. But even this was not done without great difficulty, as the ground was already so frozen that they had to throw boiling water on it several times just to drive in the stakes for the palisade.
As crippling as they seemed, the torments of cold and labour were the least of the men’s worries. For in the farthest reaches of New France, far from the safety of their settlements along the St. Lawrence, these early French adventurers were far from the masters of their own fate. That depended entirely on the local First Nations, whose intimate knowledge of the land was essential to all European exploration and trade. And this particular expedition had far from good relations with the local Iroquois nation — actually members of the Seneca tribe, affiliated with the wider Five Nations of Iroquois — who saw the shipbuilding effort on Lake Erie as an incursion into their territory. The Frenchmen were keenly aware of this, as Father Hennepin notes “. . . this new enterprise of building a fort and houses on the river Niagara . . . was like to give jealousy to the Iroquois, and even to the English, who live in this neighbourhood and have a great commerce with them . . .”
Iroquois warriors had kept a constant watch on the men from the time their vessel entered the mouth of the Niagara, sometimes hidden by the dense forest and at other times in plain view, their fearsome war clubs and tomahawks held at the ready. They would not let the beleaguered Frenchmen go any farther, and La Motte’s crew worried that it was only a matter of time before the warriors lost their patience entirely and gave in to their most violent aims.
Their commander had no illusions about the precariousness of his position, either. Hunched around the fire on that frigid, miserable Christmas Day, La Motte came to the conclusion that the only way for the project to move forward was to negotiate an agreement with the Iroquois. So, on December 26, he set out for the nearest village on snowshoes, bringing with him seven armed men and Hennepin, because the father was said to have a working knowledge of the Iroquois’ language. After five days’ travel, they arrived at the village of Tagarondies, where they met with the chief in council.
But the negotiations, which dragged on for three full days, did not break the logjam as La Motte had hoped. In a gesture of goodwill, he offered the Iroquois the traditional gifts of cloth, beads, and tools, including hatchets and knives. In return for their endorsement, La Motte promised the Iroquois two things: blacksmith services at the new fort once it was constructed and, a bit more flimsily, reduced prices on trade goods as a result of the healthy business he expected to find in the North American heartland. It wasn’t much, but it was all that La Motte had.
The chief was not impressed. He argued that the presence of a French fort in the area would certainly obstruct the route his people normally used to travel to the nearby English and Dutch colonies to trade. Why would he jeopardize these lucrative relationships for such negligible gains? In the end, the Iroquois’ response was vague; while not a definite no, the Natives certainly withheld their approval; if the French wished to continue with this foolhardy venture, they would have to do so at their own risk.
To make matters worse, just as the crestfallen La Motte and his party were preparing to depart, a war party returned to the village with two prisoners from another tribe. The life of one was spared, but the other was put to death with what Hennepin calls, “such exquisite torments that Nero, Domitian, and Maximilian never intended the like . . .” After viewing the day-long agony of the captive at the Iroquois’ insistence (during which parts of the poor soul’s body were reportedly cut off and fed back to him, as well as to some of the village children), the horrified Frenchmen returned to their miserable cabin at Lewiston in utter despair. To La Motte, putting a sailing ship on Lake Erie now seemed a near impossible goal. His men would be lucky enough to come through the winter with their lives.
Priest or Pathfinder?
Mired in what was undoubtedly the worst Christmas of his life, La Motte had no way of knowing that, back at Fort Frontenac, a plan to rescue his men and the project was hurriedly coming together. The man responsible for it was the same one who had charged La Motte with his mission in the first place — René-Robert, Cavelier de La Salle.
On that very Christmas, despite the fact that winter had arrived in full fury on Lake Ontario, La Salle boarded a small brigantine and made sail toward the Niagara River. His vessel was stuffed with the supplies La Motte’s men desperately needed to get through the winter and, more importantly, with further gifts to placate the hostile Iroquois.
It was the first step on a journey that would take La Salle to the very heart of the North American continent, turning him into one of the world’s most renowned and controversial explorers, and inextricably linking his name with Lake Erie.
La Salle’s early childhood gives no hint of the destiny that awaited him in the backwoods of North America. Quite the contrary; he was born into a well-to-do bourgeois family in Rouen on November 21, 1643. His father, Jean Cavelier, was a successful wholesale haberdasher, and the title de la Salle, which young Robert took, was the name of the family’s estate near Rouen.
Robert received his early education at the Jesuit college in his hometown, which his father, convinced that Robert was brighter than his older brother, had insisted he attend. There, under the strict discipline of the Je
suit fathers, Robert excelled, particularly in mathematics and sciences. He was so successful, in fact, that the fathers encouraged him to take his vows, which he did at the age of fifteen, and joined the Jesuits’ powerful Society of Jesus in Paris. But there is evidence that La Salle’s motives in becoming an ordained priest may have gone further than religious conviction, as Professor Paul Chesnel, in his 1901 work, History of Cavelier de la Salle, explains:
. . . he afterwards entered the Society of Jesus as a novice, undoubtedly expecting to be sent as a missionary to remote countries; thus he did reconcile filial obedience with an inherent desire for voyage and adventure. But being possessed of a proud nature, he soon realized that he lacked the docility essential to the making of a good priest . . .
Despite his independent streak, La Salle would spend the next seven years in the Society teaching math and sciences. But his imagination was captivated by the vast wilderness of North America. This was undoubtedly fuelled, at least in part, by reading the Jesuit Relations, which were published between 1632 and 1673. These were regular reports filed by missionaries in the field, and they were very popular reading in France. The missionaries’ tales of mighty forests, thundering waters, and savage Native warriors would certainly have made an impression on the young La Salle. He made several requests to be sent to North America, but each was declined; under the rigorous discipline of the Jesuit order, one did not request reassignment, one was told where to go. In light of La Salle’s ongoing struggles to leave the comfortable confines of Paris, it is not hard to imagine how it must have rankled when his older and supposedly less intelligent brother, Jean, a priest of the Sulpician order, was sent to Quebec as an abbé.
Illustration courtesy of National Archives of Canada C-007802
René-Robert, Cavelier de La Salle. The controversial explorer sought to vastly expand the boundaries of New France.
Finally, in 1665, after years of struggling to reconcile his religious calling with his thirst for adventure and exploration, the latter won out, and La Salle tendered his resignation to the fathers, claiming he had to be released from his vows due to his “moral frailties.” On March 28, 1667, he left the convent for good.
Suddenly penniless (he had taken an oath of poverty as part of his vows, which denied him access to the Cavelier family fortune), La Salle quickly came to the realization that there was no future for him in France. In early 1667, he boarded a ship bound for Canada, taking with him several grand ideas, honed over many years, for expanding the size and scope of King Louis XIV’s holdings in North America, possibly linking them to a lucrative trade route through the Great Lakes to Asia. It was the first inkling of the vast trading network the lakes were set to become.
A Route to the Southern Sea
Quebec in 1667 was still a relatively new settlement, living in a precarious peace with the neighbouring First Nations. Samuel de Champlain had founded it in 1608 and, though the colony had grown, it still counted less than 10,000 souls as permanent inhabitants, with a large number of these arriving only two years before as soldiers sent by Louis XIV to take the offensive against the Iroquois. That campaign had led to the peace and the soldiers, rewarded with free land, had begun to play a major role in the colony’s growth.
But farming and fishing were not profitable enough on their own to attract the infusion of enterprising young blood that New France so desperately needed; that honour went to the fur trade. This displeased the king’s powerful colonial minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Believing that a thriving New France would give the mother country a considerable advantage over colonial rivals like England and Spain, he was frustrated by reports of the number of young men who had fled their settlements and headed west to immerse themselves into Native society and the fur trade. With many of these coureurs de bois gone, Quebec lacked the labour force necessary to promote the growth of a settled population and increase its standard of living.
Looming over all of this, of course, was the powerful Catholic Church. In Quebec, it took the form of several different orders, the most dominant being the Jesuits. The church was a major landholder in the colony, and was deeply embedded in the lives of the colonists in many ways: providing labour and funding, helping them to clear their land, and establishing colleges and other institutions. But the church’s main goal was to establish a society based on moral, and by modern standards puritanical, grounds in New France, and key to this was its self-proclaimed mission to bring the continent’s Native people into God’s flock. The church actively pursued this goal by sending missionaries throughout the present provinces of Quebec and Ontario, as well as into upper New York State, with a major missionary effort focusing on the Huron people, known as Sainte-Marie or Huronia, near southern Georgian Bay.
Although the missionary orders were very much rivals, one thing that united them was their dislike of the colony’s fur traders, especially the coureurs de bois, who lived among the Natives and therefore outside the church’s long grasp. What irked them even more was that many traders engaged in the destructive practice of trading liquor for furs, exposing Native people to the destructive effects of alcohol, including debilitating long-term addiction. This issue divided Quebec’s citizens perhaps more than any other, and made the missionaries’ already difficult job nearly impossible.
It was into this confused and politically charged world that La Salle stepped when he landed at Quebec City sometime between June and November of 1667. Almost immediately, the outspoken young man from Rouen drew the ire of both the fur traders and the missionaries: to the traders, he was a child of privilege who had managed to quickly corral the favour of the colony’s governor, Daniel de Rémy de Courcelle. Mostly, however, they feared that La Salle’s schemes to expand the colony’s wealth would cut into their outlandish profits.
To the Jesuits, La Salle was an enigma. Who was this man who had so easily abandoned the missionary life? they wondered. Above all, the fathers were curious about La Salle’s motives. Did he still possess the zeal for Catholicism that he had shown as a boy, or was he no better than the traders, interested only in profits? La Salle drew the suspicion of just about everyone in New France.
But to the Sulpician order, seen as a lesser religious force than the Jesuits in New France, La Salle represented an opportunity. Sensing this energetic young former Jesuit’s potential as a useful ally, they decided to grant him several thousand hectares of land outside Montreal, which was at this time a crude village that had been founded some thirty years earlier and had a meagre population of only a few hundred residents.
A frontier town mainly populated by traders, coureurs de bois, and their Native allies, Montreal was a far cry from Quebec City’s relative cleanliness and almost European charm. Militarily, it was a disaster waiting to happen: with few fortifications, the settlement was largely indefensible. Its residents lived in constant fear of the surrounding Native tribes, who were often openly hostile to their very presence in the area. They could, and often did, attack colonists who dared to wander outside Montreal’s palisades.
None of this appeared to trouble La Salle. Working through the fall and winter of 1667, he managed to make his land arable, clearing the dense forest and planting crops. Along with his tenant farmers, he made his farm, or seigneury, a modest success — before long, it began turning a small profit.
But, just as he had in France, La Salle was looking for a way to turn his back on a quiet life in the countryside. Throughout his first two years in Canada, he tried to think of plans for financing and undertaking his voyages of discovery. In the winter of 1669, two Iroquois who had camped on La Salle’s land fired his imagination even further: they told him of a river to the south of Lake Erie called the Ohio. It took nine months, they said, to follow the river down to its mouth. There, it opened onto a large sea. Listening to the men’s vivid descriptions of this river, La Salle became convinced that the time to act on his plans was at hand. He decided he had to set out for the Ohio as soon as possible “in order,” he wrote, �
��not to leave to another the honour of finding the way to the Southern Sea, and thereby the route to China.”
Among the Iroquois
As La Salle was well aware, the main stumbling block to an expedition as ambitious as the one he was planning was finding enough money to get it off the ground. To that end, La Salle, working diligently over the previous two years to develop his property, found himself with a valuable asset. He decided to sell most of the land back to the Sulpicians, keeping only his house, which he intended to use as a fur-trading factory. The sale netted him the considerable sum of 3,000 livres. But that was the easy part; more difficult would be convincing Governor Courcelle to allow him to undertake the voyage at all. La Salle set off for Quebec by canoe to make his case.
Courcelle listened carefully as La Salle, whose eloquence was by this time well known, put forward his plans. Courcelle approved of the young explorer’s ambition and desire to explore the Ohio but, mindful of Colbert’s orders that the colony not spread itself too thin, was reluctant to allow La Salle to strike out on his own. What if, after all, the young man was to follow so many others into the life of a simple coureur de bois? It would be a great loss.
So, Courcelle proposed a compromise; he would grant La Salle permission to conduct his expedition. But the governor requested that he couple his efforts with those of a Sulpician missionary, François Dollier de Casson, who was journeying to the same area to explore the possibility of converting Native people living in the Ohio Valley to Christianity.
The Sulpicians’ superior, Abbé de Queylus, was at first cool to Courcelle’s idea, writing of his fear that La Salle’s temper, “which was known to be somewhat volatile, might lead him to quit [the expedition] at the first whim.” So de Queylus assigned a second Sulpician, René de Bréhant de Galinée, to accompany La Salle and Dollier. According to Galinée’s own modest description of his skills: “I had already some smattering of mathematics, enough to construct a map in a sort of a fashion . . .”
