La Salle paddled to the Gulf of Mexico and claimed half a continent for France
On April 9, 1682, a French fur trader stood where the Mississippi meets the Gulf of Mexico and declared its entire drainage basin French territory, naming it La Louisiane after Louis XIV. René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, had arrived in Canada almost penniless. His record also includes invented rivers and a legend historians still untangle.
He was born into a comfortable family in Rouen on November 22, 1643, and took initial Jesuit vows in 1660, which obliged him to give up his inheritance. He sailed for New France in 1666, and in 1667 left the order, citing moral weaknesses. He bought a seigneurie at the western tip of the Island of Montreal, later called Lachine, and began learning Iroquois languages. Sieur was a purchased title, roughly lord of the manor; La Salle was the name of a family estate near Rouen, but it stuck to him like a surname.
When Seneca people described a great river running to the sea, he sold Lachine and set out in July 1669 with nine canoes and 24 men, hoping for a western route to China. A fever that September made him turn back, and the written trail then goes dark. His journal was lost in 1756, and the 19th-century archivist Pierre Margry published documents so mixed with extracts and altered copies that the US Congress set aside $10,000 to have originals verified. La Salle never claimed to have found the Ohio, though at various times he described rivers, such as the Baudrane, that did not exist.
In 1673 he helped Governor Frontenac raise a wooden fort at the mouth of the Cataraqui River, today's Kingston, Ontario, to control the Great Lakes fur trade, and later rebuilt it in stone. With his lieutenant Henri de Tonti he reached Niagara in December 1678, the first Europeans recorded as seeing the falls. His 45-ton barque Le Griffon, launched in 1679, sailed through Lakes Erie and Huron to Green Bay, then vanished with a cargo of furs. The party pushed on to Fort Crèvecoeur near present-day Peoria.
The 1682 canoe voyage from the Illinois River to the Gulf followed Jolliet and Marquette's upper Mississippi journey of 1673 to 1674 but carried French claims all the way to the sea. A later expedition to the Gulf coast in 1684 ended badly; he was killed on March 19, 1687. That venture helped give the United States a claim to Texas after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.
Source: René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle
