(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
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Robert was the second son of Jean Cavelier, a wealthy burgher of Rouen, where this child was baptized in the parish church of St. Herbland, November 22, 1643. His mother was Catherine Geest, and one of her relatives was the boy's godfather. His title La Salle came from a family seigniory in the neighborhood of Rouen.
He studied at the Jesuit college at Rouen, which was later the Lycée Corneille.
At the urgent desire of his father, La Salle entered the Society of Jesus as a novice. The training he received was antagonistic to his independent, adventurous nature, and upon his father's death, when he was twenty-two years old, he left the Jesuits, apparently without ill will on either side. Through this or other experiences, however, he had acquired a dislike for the order and all its members which often broke out into open hostility. By the law of the time, when he took his first vows he lost his share of the paternal estate, and was dependent upon the allowance his relatives chose to make him.
His elder brother, Jean Cavelier, a member of the order of St. Sulpice, before the father's death had gone to New France, where the Sulpicians held the seigniory of Montreal. Possibly the connection of an uncle with the Hundred Associates for New France had interested the Caveliers in the colony of Canada, for in the summer of 1666 Robert followed his brother thither. From the Sulpicians he received a grant of land on the western end of the island of Montreal and there he erected several buildings, traded with the natives, and lived for two years the life of a pioneer farmer. His estate afterwards received the name of "La Chine" in derision of his fruitless efforts to range from there to China. During the winter of 1668-69 La Salle entertained at his manor house two Iroquois Indians, who informed him of westward-flowing waters and awakened in him a desire for exploration.
The next summer he sold his seigniory back to the convent of St. Sulpice at Montreal and entered upon the career which brought him fame. The Sulpicians were at this time sending two members of their order to begin missions in the West; on the advice of the Superior, La Salle attached himself to this expedition, which left Montreal July 6, 1669, with seven canoes, four of them conducted for La Salle. The expedition ascended the St. Lawrence River to Lake Ontario, coasted its southern shore to Irondequoit Bay, and there beached the canoes and went into the interior to obtain guides from the Iroquois. La Salle had boasted of his knowledge of the language, but once among the Indians he could not make himself understood. By means of a Dutch interpreter, however, who spoke a little French, the explorers obtained information concerning the geography of the country west of the Iroquois villages and again skirted the lake shore to the mouth of the Niagara River, where they could hear the noise of the great falls.
They did not visit the falls, but went inland, where in a village at the western end of Lake Ontario they met Louis Jolliet returning from a visit to the Ottawa country. Jolliet's report made the Sulpicians decide to visit the Northwest, but La Salle adhered to his purpose of seeking the Ohio, the headwaters of which the Iroquois had reported to be near at hand. He had been ill and made an excuse of his illness to leave the party. Whether he at that time finally reached the Ohio and sailed down it to the falls at Louisville, as he later claimed, is a moot question. That he did not discover the Ohio and saw it for the first time when he passed its mouth in 1682 seems by far the greater probability.
What occupied the young explorer from 1669 to 1673 is not known; one narrator speaks of meeting him in 1670 hunting on the Ottawa River. Meanwhile Jolliet had discovered the upper reaches of the Mississippi and had found that it descended to the Gulf of Mexico, and a furor for western exploration was in the air. About this time a new governor arrived at Quebec who pacified the Iroquois and built a fort on the north shore of Lake Ontario to which he gave his own name of Frontenac. In the Count de Frontenac La Salle found a kindred soul; their spirits leaped together to do some great thing for France.
Frontenac sent La Salle to court to obtain permission for the monopoly of the fur trade on which they hoped to build their structure of expansion. The young Norman, bronzed by years in the open, with his imaginative description of life in the wilderness, quickly gained favor and obtained a grant of Fort Frontenac as a seigniory with exclusive permission for trade. Coming back to Canada with his future companion, Friar Louis Hennepin, as a fellow passenger, La Salle made plans with Frontenac to exploit the concession and to arrange for future discovery.
After three years at Fort Frontenac, during which it is probable that La Salle first visited the upper Great Lakes, he went again to France to obtain fresh privileges. Again he was successful in winning favor at court. He was granted a title of nobility and a patent permitting him to explore and exploit the regions of the West and to deal in buffalo and lesser furs, but not in beaver: an exception which he constantly ignored.
Upon his arrival in the summer of 1678 in New France, accompanied by his faithful lieutenant, Tonty of the iron hand, he and Frontenac made plans for opening the West and beginning therein an empire for Louis XIV. These plans required the building of a sailing vessel above Niagara Falls: La Salle had already two barks on Lake Ontario. A shipyard was established near Buffalo on the Niagara River and there the Griffon (named for Frontenac's heraldic device) was launched in the early summer of 1679.
La Salle had already sent traders into the West to gather peltry for the expenses of his expedition. He also sent Tonty in advance to gather furs in the Detroit region. Thence they went together to Michilimackinac, where they arrived at the end of August. Sailing on to Green Bay, the Griffon awakened fear and consternation among the savages, who saw in it an emblem of the overmastering power of the white men. At Green Bay La Salle found that his traders had gathered a great store of furs, which he loaded onto his vessel to go back to Fort Frontenac. He and his men then took canoes to continue their journey. The Griffon was never seen or heard from after that time; its fate has remained a mystery to this day.
Advancing up Lake Michigan, the adventurers entered St. Joseph River, portaged to the Kankakee, and sailed down the Illinois to Lake Peoria, where early in January was built Fort Crevecoeur. Thence La Salle sent three men, including Father Hennepin, to explore the upper Mississippi and gather furs. He himself, leaving Tonty in charge, started overland on foot for Fort Frontenac in pursuit of some deserters and in order to settle with his creditors, who were seizing the fort and stopping supplies. This terrible journey, during the melting weather of early spring, over an unknown route, he accomplished in sixty-five days. At the fort he was detained until late autumn, and on going back to the Illinois he found only the ruins of his enterprise; most of his men had deserted and Tonty and the missionaries had fled before an invasion of hostile Iroquois.
At Mackinac in June 1681 the two explorers were reunited and returned again to the Illinois country, rebuilt their fort, this time on the upper Illinois River, on the summit of a rock near the present Ottawa. La Salle now sought to settle around his post a great confederation of western Indians, as a defense against the encroachments of the Iroquois. From this post he and Tonty set forth early in 1682 to explore the Mississippi.
On their arrival at the Gulf, on April 9, they took possession of all the river valley for the king of France and named it in his honor Louisiana. (Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, vol. XI, 1888, pp. 33-36. ) This was the climax of La Salle's career. Hitherto he had been supported by Governor Frontenac, but in 1682 Frontenac was replaced by a nominee of the Jesuit party, Antoine Lefebre, Sieur de la Barre. La Barre deprived La Salle of the command of his fort in the Illinois country and summoned him to Quebec to answer for misdemeanors. La Salle, who was on his way to Canada when he heard of this catastrophe, sent Tonty to deliver Fort St. Louis to La Barre's appointee while he continued his voyage to France, disdaining to reply to the governor's charge. In France he was at once the hero of the hour. He narrated his adventures, described the vast and wonderful country he had explored, and was restored by the King to all his commands and honors in New France.
He asked for an expedition to colonize the mouth of the Mississippi, and accordingly a fleet was prepared for this enterprise, with four ships, two hundred colonists, and many supplies. He was named viceroy of North America and given command from Illinois to the Spanish borders. The expedition sailed July 24, 1684, but by some inadvertence missed the mouth of the Mississippi and landed on the coast of Texas. The ships sailed home March 12, 1685, and La Salle, now aware that he was not on the Mississippi, made heroic efforts to find it. He was on his final journey toward that river when on the Brazos River just above the mouth of the Navasota his men mutinied and shot him.
His brother Jean, who had accompanied him, and his aide, Henri Joutel, made their way to Tonty in the Illinois country and thence to France without revealing the news of the death of La Salle. La Salle's great projects and plans, his ambitious ideas and hopes, have blinded his biographers to the fact that most of his failures were due to his own defects. He was a dreamer without adequate executive power to carry out his schemes. He could not control the natives; he alienated his own men by his haughty bearing and lack of sympathy; he showed uncertainty and vacillation at critical moments. Yet his lack of success should not obscure his accomplishments both as an explorer and a publicity agent for the interior of North America.
La Salle was undoubtedly the first of the French explorers to trace the Mississippi to its mouth, he appreciated the possibilities of the Mississippi Valley, and anticipated its future greatness. He also explored the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada and the Gulf of Mexico. In any judgment of him, his mistakes and failures must be subordinated to his vision, which encompassed an empire for France in the heart of America.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
