René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, or Robert LaSalle (
November 22, 1643 – March 19, 1687)
He was a French explorer. He explored the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada, The Mississippi River, and the Gulf of Mexico, and claimed the entire Mississippi basin for France.
La Salle was briefly a member of the Jesuit religious order, taking his vows in 1660. On 27 March 1667, he was released from the Society of Jesus after citing " moral weaknesses" in his request. Having lost funds from his father, which he had been required to reject upon joining the Jesuit order, La Salle was close to being destitute when he travelled to North America, sailing to Canada in the Spring of 1666 and arriving in 1667 in New France. His brother Jean, a Sulpician priest, had moved to New France the year before.
La Salle immediately began to sale land grants, set up a village and learn the languages of the native peoples. The Iroquois told him of a great river, called the Ohio, which flowed into the Mississippi River. Thinking this river flowed into the Gulf of California, he began to plan for expeditions to find a western passage to China. He sought and received permission from the Governor to embark on the expedition. He sold his interests in the lands that had been given to him in New France to pay for the venture.
La Salle led his first expedition in 1669. He reached the Ohio River and followed it as far as present day Louisville, Kentucky. He did not travel all the way to the Mississippi river which Louis Joliet discovered in 1672. His group consisted of five canoes and 12 men.
La Salle next oversaw the building of Fort Frontenac (now in Kingston, Ontario) on Lake Ontario as part of a fur trade venture. The fort, which was completed in 1673, was named for La Salle's patron, Louis de Baude Frontenac, Governor General of New France. Early the next year La Salle returned to France to give a report to the king of France. He also asked permission to continue his explorations and to build several fur trading forts. He received the financial support he was seeking.
On 7 August 1679, La Salle set sail on Le Griffon, which he and Tonti had constructed at Fort Conti, near present day Niagara Falls. Becoming the first white men to navigate the Great Lakes by a sailing ship, they sailed up Lake Erie to Lake Huron, then up Huron to Mackinac and then to present day Green Bay, Wisconsin. La Salle then departed with his men in canoes down the western shore of Lake Michigan. In January of 1680, La Salle's men built a stockade and called it Fort Miami at the mouth of the Miami River (now St. Joseph River in St. Joseph, Michigan), and waited for a party led by Tonti, who had crossed the peninsula on foot. Tonti arrived on November 20, and on December 3 the entire party set off up the St. Joseph, which they followed until they reached a portage to the Kankakee River. They followed the Kankakee to the Illinois River, where they established Fort Crèvecoeur near present-day Peoria Illinois. La Salle then set off on foot for Fort Frontenac for supplies. While he was gone, Louis Hennepin followed the Illinois River to its junction with the Mississippi, but was captured by a Native American war party and carried off to Minnesota. The soldiers at the fort mutinied, and destroyed the fort. La Salle captured the mutineers on Lake Ontario.
La Salle then reassembled his group for the expedition for which he is most well known. Leaving Fort Crevecoeur with twenty-three Frenchmen and eighteen Native Americans, he canoed down the Mississippi River in 1682, naming the Mississippi basin Louisiana in honour of Louis XIV. At what is now Memphis, Tennessee he built a small fort, Fort Prudhomme. On April 9, at the mouth of the Mississippi River, near modern Venice, Louisiana, La Salle buried an engraved plate and a cross, claiming the territory for France.
In 1683, on his return voyage, he established Fort Saint Louis of Illinois, on the Illinois River, to replace Fort Crevecoeur. Tonti, a friend, was to command the fort while La Salle travelled again to France for supplies.
La Salle returned with a large expedition designed to establish a French colony on the Gulf of Mexico, at the mouth of the Mississippi River. They left France in 1684 with 4 ships and 300 colonists. The expedition was plagued by pirates, hostile Indians, and poor navigation. One ship was lost to pirates in the West Indies, a second sank in the inlets of Matagorda Bay, where a third ran aground. They set up Fort Saint Louis of Texas, near Victoria, Texas. La Salle led a group eastward on foot on three occasions to try to locate the Mississippi river. During the last such search his remaining 36 followers mutinied, and he was murdered by four of them near the site of modern Navasota, Texas. The colony he established in Texas lasted only until 1688, when Native Americans massacred the 20 remaining adults and took five children as captives. Tonti sent out search missions in 1689 when he learned of the expedition's fate, but failed to reach a fort with survivors.