The younger son of a landed gentleman, La Salle had trained as a Jesuit before deciding he detested the order. At the age of 24, therefore, he sailed for Nouvelle France, where his older brother was an influential priest. Almost as soon as La Salle arrived in Montreal he was given a stretch of land eight miles out of town and told to settle it. He did so efficiently and thoroughly, clearing an area of wilderness, constructing houses and populating them with tenant farmers. But he had not come to the New World merely to be a semi-feudal landlord. According to one description, he was ‘A man of iron, if ever there was one – a man austere and cold in manner, and endowed with indomitable pluck and perseverance’. He was also calculating and ambitious. While developing his estate, he became fluent in several Indian languages, his object being to obtain first-hand knowledge of the country’s trade potential. In this he was successful. After two years’ inquiry he learned of a freshwater route that began somewhere to the south of the Great Lakes and emptied in the ‘Vermilion Sea’, or the Gulf of California. He promptly sold his land and, in conjunction with two priests, outfitted a party to search for what could only be a southern version of the North-West Passage. The joint expedition left Montreal on 6 July 1669 with nine canoes and 24 men, 15 of whom had been suborned from La Salle’s estate.
At Lake Ontario they encountered the explorer and fur-trader Louis Joliet, who helpfully gave them a map he had made of the region. At the same time, however, he informed the priests that several Indian tribes around Lake Superior had never heard of Christianity. It was too great a temptation: the clerics set out immediately for the west. La Salle, feigning sickness, said he would be unable to accompany them. The priests held a brief mass, then went in search of souls. (They did not search long: having lost their altar trappings in a stream, they abandoned the quest and went home.) Once they were out of sight La Salle rose from his sickbed and continued south. For two years he and his men traipsed across the wilderness, by his own account discovering the rivers Ohio and Illinois, neither of which was the channel he sought. He returned penniless to Montreal in 1671, many of his men having already deserted. In derision they named his holding La Chine, ‘China’ – by which name it is still known today.
La Salle was unrepentant. Changing tack, he addressed the problem of imperialism. The British and Dutch were hemmed in by the Appalachian Mountains, but the French had already reached the Great Lakes, and between the Appalachians and the Pacific was an enormous tract of land. In June 1671 one Simon François de Saint-Lusson had reached Sault Ste. Marie on Lake Superior, and in the name of King Louis XIV had taken possession of ‘all countries, rivers, lakes and streams ... bounded on one side by the seas of the North and West, and on the other side by the South Sea’. His claim (which took in most of North America) was as meaningless as it was sweeping. La Salle, however, proposed a more concrete assertion of sovereignty. To the west and south of the Great Lakes flowed a river that had various names but was commonly called the Mississippi. In standard colonial practice the conquest of a river conferred ownership of its entire watershed. It had yet to be determined whether the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California or the Gulf of Mexico (the latter was favoured by most), but wherever it went it would be a huge addition to France’s possessions. With the support of Nouvelle France’s intendant, Jean Talon – as well as its newly appointed governor, Count Louis Frontenac – La Salle sailed for France to petition the king for funds.
The Royal Court was interested. Louis XIV’s minister for commerce had already heard of La Salle, writing to Talon in 1671, ‘Your action in sending Sieur de la Salle to the southward and Sieur de Saint-Lusson to the northward to discover the passage to the South Sea is very good; but the principal thing to which you must look in these kinds of discoveries is to find copper mines.’ Clearheadedly, the court was concerned less with the chimerical North-West Passage than with the tangible riches – whether mineral or fur – that North America might contain. When La Salle offered to chart the Mississippi to its mouth, erecting forts as he went, the king listened to him. The expedition would cost little, its potential was great, and if La Salle – who was grimmer and more abrupt than the usual supplicants – happened to die along the way with all his men, then who cared? And it wasn’t as if they had to spend any money. They gave him a title, a patent to explore the Mississippi, ‘through which, to all appearances a way may be found to Mexico’, and a five-year monopoly on the trade in buffalo hides. With this he was expected to pay his way to the south. They imposed also the condition that he build and garrison a fort on the shores of Lake Ontario, and that he erect and maintain similar forts along the Mississippi. La Salle returned to Nouvelle France in 1675, built his first fort – Fort Frontenac, on Lake Ontario – using the royal approval to borrow money for the venture, and by 1678, after a second visit to France to collect men and materials, was ready to go.
La Salle’s plan was to build a ship at Fort Frontenac, on which he would sail to a suitable spot on the Great Lakes, from where, a new fort and a new ship having been constructed, he would travel down the Mississippi. For his officers he had Father Louis Hennepin, an adventurous missionary whom he did not particularly like but who had been in Nouvelle France for three years, plus two friends from Paris: Dominique La Motte de Luciere, and Captain Henri Tonty, an Italian soldier who had lost a hand to a grenade while fighting in Sicily and wore a sinister iron replacement that he covered with a glove. Beneath him he had selection of about 40 men, mostly French sailors and shipwrights, with a sprinkling of Flemish, German and Italian adventurers. An advance party left Fort Frontenac on 18 November 1678 under Hennepin and La Motte. By 6 December they had discovered the Niagara Falls, and at a site six miles upriver they constructed the first of the expedition’s forts. They also built a shipyard from which, despite cold, hunger and the distrust of the Indians, a small ship gradually emerged. Displacing about 45 tons, it took its name and its figurehead from the griffin that adorned La Salle’s coat of arms. Having been delayed in Quebec, La Salle and Tonty followed later with the rest of the men and a shipload of supplies. A few hours from their destination they left the ship in charge of its pilot and went ahead on foot. When they reached the Niagara they found that La Motte had gone home, his health broken, and that the different nationalities were bickering among themselves. On top of this, news arrived that the pilot had crashed the ship. All the food and all the merchandise for the Mississippi trip were lost, the only articles saved being the anchors and cables for the Griffin. While detained at Quebec, La Salle had already encountered difficulties, including the hostility of the Jesuits – to which he responded in like measure – and an attempted poisoning by a rival explorer. These new setbacks were unwelcoming. As Hennepin wrote, it ‘would have made anybody but himself give up the enterprise’.
La Salle did not give up. He walked through the snow to Fort Frontenac, accompanied by two men and a sledgeload of food pulled by a single dog, to fetch more provisions. Here, however, he learned that his creditors considered him a bad risk and had begun to seize his property. It took months to sort his affairs, and he did not return to Niagara until August 1679. By September the Griffin was in Lake Michigan, and already six men had deserted. La Salle and Tonty hunted them down, retrieved the property they had stolen, and continued south to the Mississippi.
La Salle was not a likeable person. ‘By nature cold, reserved and reticent,’ according to one of his more admiring biographers, ‘he was not a genial man; and possessed little or none of that magnetism which wins men’s hearts. Even the few most faithful and trusted companions of his labours could hardly be considered as on terms of intimacy with him.’ He was not a natural leader, and his attitude towards his employees, ‘who comprehended him not, but were simply compelled by the force of his will, certainly did not tend to establish that community of interest which should have existed between them. It was, in fact, this lacking quality in an otherwise magnificent character, which was ever thwarting his plans and which rendered hi
s brief career of eight years in exploration work an almost uninterrupted record of disaster.’
He had assumed that a waterway existed between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi. When he found it did not, and had to make a portage to the Illinois, the expedition became even more fragile. ‘It was to the last degree difficult to hold the men to their duty,’ wrote one chronicler. ‘Discipline had no resources and no guarantee.’ Repeatedly La Salle went north to fetch supplies, leaving Hennepin to scout the Illinois while Tonty maintained order with his iron fist. The Griffin vanished, either sunk in a storm or destroyed by its discontented crew. Hennepin reached the confluence of the Illinois and the Mississippi, but was captured by Indians in the region of present-day Minneapolis; although later released, he never rejoined the expedition and caught the next ship home, refusing ever to set foot in America again. More and more men deserted. Those who remained did so mainly for the opportunity to poison La Salle – in which they nearly succeeded. By 7 December 1681 the party was at the junction of the Illinois and the Mississippi, where they were delayed by further desertions, the theft of supplies, a war between the Iroquois and Illinois Indians, and the wholesale plundering of their most recent fort by the garrison they had left to man it.
Back La Salle went to Fort Frontenac – a distance of several hundred miles – where he enlisted 23 Frenchmen and 18 Indians to drag canoes and food through the snow to the Mississippi. They reached the river in February 1682, waited a while for the ice to clear, then began their journey. They passed, one by one, the mouths of the Missouri, the Ohio and the Arkansas rivers, and after 62 days, on 6 April, reached the delta. It had three channels. La Salle took the western, Tonty the eastern and a new recruit, Jean Bourdon Dautray, the middle. They reconvened on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico on 9 April, where they raised a stone pillar carrying the royal coat of arms and La Salle officially claimed the new territory for France, naming it La Louisiane (Louisiana) in honour of his monarch. By territory he did not mean a small piece of land on the delta, nor even the area currently occupied by the US state of Louisiana, but a vast domain extending from the Gulf to the Great Lakes. Eleven years after Saint-Lusson had stood on the shores of Lake Superior and announced that the whole continent belonged to France, his excitable declaration now had some meaning.
The return journey up the Mississippi was little better than the one down. As their supplies dwindled they were forced to live off the land, sometimes surviving on nothing but acorns. They all suffered from fever, La Salle in particular. But at least there were no more desertions. Apart from the fact that there would have been no point in abandoning an expedition that was going home, the most unreliable members had already been winnowed out, leaving a solid core of loyal men. And at least, too, they were travelling over familiar ground. On the upper reaches of the Illinois, at a confluence of three tributaries, they paused for the winter. Clearing an acre of land on the top of a 125-foot high prominence called Starved Rock, La Salle built a stockade to which he gave the name Fort St Louis. It was an ideal defensive position, surrounded on three sides by perpendicular cliffs and approachable only by a steep track up the fourth. The surrounding forests contained game, the river was rich in fish and the ground was cultivable.
As part of his grand scheme to extend France’s influence, La Salle had envisaged the creation of colonies. They were not to be colonies in the accepted imperial sense, but confederations of friendly Indian tribes protected by white overseers. By this means he hoped to eradicate the threat from warlike tribes such as the Iroquois and the Sioux, and to safeguard the uninterrupted flow of commodities from the interior. By the spring of 1683, with 20 Frenchmen living in Fort St Louis and approximately 20,000 Indians gathered beneath them for protection, Starved Rock had become the centre of his first colony. La Salle distributed land (which he did not own) to his men who, it was understood, would repay him with arms and a share of their profits. As the buffalo skins began to come in – La Salle had promised not to interfere with the fur trade – the two sides colluded in a feudal arrangement that seemed to benefit everyone. It was the same system, albeit in a wilder environment, by which La Salle had obtained his first holding in Nouvelle France. Starved Rock became the centre of a little kingdom with La Salle at its head, a fact that was recognized in 1684 by a mapmaker who produced a detailed picture of the settlements south of the Great Lakes, labelling them as ‘COLONIE DU SR. DE LA SALLE’.
Unfortunately, during La Salle’s absence Frontenac had been replaced by a new governor, Le Fèvre de La Barre. No less corrupt than his predecessors, La Barre saw the colony as a threat to his own trading interests, and when a group of La Salle’s men returned to civilization to obtain supplies La Barre had them arrested. At the same time he occupied Fort Frontenac, sold its contents and put his own cattle on La Salle’s crops. Further, he sent to France denigratory reports of La Salle’s behaviour, which reached such a high level that on 5 August 1683 the king himself intervened. ‘I am convinced’, he wrote, ‘that the discovery of the Sieur de la Salle is very useless, and that such enterprises ought to be prevented in future.’ La Salle, meanwhile, was becoming desperate. ‘I have only twenty men, with scarcely a hundred pounds of powder; and I cannot long hold the country without more. The Illinois are very capricious and uncertain.’ When pleading failed, he gave Tonty command of the colony and left for Quebec – passing en route an officer whom La Barre had sent to take control of Starved Rock – from where he sailed to France, accompanied by two Indian servants, to clear his name.
La Salle’s petition to the king was impressive. Speaking of himself in the third person, he pointed out that ‘he has omitted nothing that was needful to [the expedition’s] success, notwithstanding dangerous illness, heavy losses and all the other evils he has suffered, which would have overcome the courage of any one who had not the same zeal and devotion for the accomplishment of this purpose. During five years he has made five journeys, of more, in all, than five thousand leagues, for the most part on foot, with extreme fatigue, through snow and through water, without escort, without provisions, without bread, without wine, without recreation, and without repose. He has traversed more than six hundred leagues of country hitherto unknown among savage and cannibal nations, against whom he must daily make fight.’ And he had done it because he thought it ‘would be agreeable to His Majesty’.
As the king weakened, La Salle asked permission to lead a second expedition to the Gulf of Mexico to safeguard the new territory. He proposed the creation of a fortified outpost at the mouth of the Mississippi and another about 180 miles upriver, where he reckoned he could raise an army of more than 15,000 Indians. ‘Should foreigners anticipate us,’ he warned, ‘they will complete the ruin of Nouvelle France, which they already hem in by their establishments of Virginia, Pennsylvania, New England, and Hudson’s Bay.’ The establishments to which he referred were English, but he had other foreigners in mind too. France was currently at war with Spain, and he foresaw a time when the conflict might spread to the Americas. His Indian army could be used to invade Spain’s Mexican colonies – the Spaniards were widely detested, he said, and it would be no trouble to overrun the nearest settlement, whose 400 or so white inhabitants were ‘more fit to work the mines than fight’. All he asked was a single ship with 30 cannon and 200 men. He would collect a further 50 men from French settlements on Haiti. If need be, he could also summon several thousand warriors from his colony. And if the war stopped, within a year he would either repay the Crown or cede it his settlements. In practice, his proposals were ridiculous: he could not possibly persuade 15,000 Indians to join him, let alone form them into an army; he did not know precisely where he was going, having taken only a rough latitude of the Mississippi delta, which was meaningless without longitude; and the idea of the Illinois marching south to join a war in Mexico was laughable. On paper, however, his scheme looked very plausible.
The king was so impressed that he cancelled La Salle’s debts, ordered La Barre to return h
is property, and gave him not a 30-gun ship but the 36-gun Jolie, complete with an experienced captain in the French navy named Beaujeu. In addition he supplied a six-gun frigate, Belle, a store-ship, Aimable, and a ketch, St François. He also gave him 100 soldiers, 100 sailors and artificers, plus an extensive library of gold-tooled books – on top of which several volunteers enlisted to join the new colony, including La Salle’s brother, Jean Cavelier, and two nephews. With a thought to the future, a number of women and children were also put aboard. When La Salle sailed in 24 July 1684 he had not 200 but 280 people under his command. By the time they reached the Gulf of Mexico he had alienated almost every one of them and was barely on speaking terms with Beaujeu.
Everything started to go wrong at Haiti. The ketch, with its irreplaceable cargo of tools and building materials, was captured by the Spanish. La Salle fell ill and, as they waited for him to recover, so did everyone else. ‘Now everyone is sick,’ Beaujeu wrote home, ‘and he himself has a violent fever, as dangerous, the surgeon tells me, to the mind as to the body.’ Beaujeu also reported that those Frenchmen in Haiti who knew the Mississippi delta said it was too dangerous at this time of year and refused to accompany them. La Salle did not recover until the end of November, and when they finally reached the mainland in January they couldn’t find the Mississippi. Convinced that they were to the east of the delta, La Salle led the ships westwards. With the land trending to the south, however, he realized he had gone too far. Retracing his course, he discovered a bay, which he named the Bay of St Louis, and from here, reconnoitring inland, he sighted a broad river that could only be a western branch of the Mississippi. He would have liked to take the ships further east, but Beaujeu balked at the suggestion: not only did he think the whole enterprise muddleheaded and its commander an arrogant fool, but he had barely enough food to see the Jolie back to France. He refused to be swayed, even when offered some of the colonists’ provisions. La Salle, who disliked Beaujeu almost as much as Beaujeu disliked him, agreed that he could leave as soon as the colonists had landed. On 20 February 1685 the Aimable foundered on a sandbar at the mouth of the bay, with the loss of most of its cargo. A few days later two volunteers were killed and two more wounded by Indians. Having seen the group ashore, as agreed, Beaujeu told La Salle that he couldn’t unload any more supplies because they were buried too deep in the hold. Then he departed, taking several of the more discontented volunteers with him. (According to some accounts, he later mapped the mouth of the Mississippi before sailing for France.)
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