La Salle Explores Length of Mississippi River

This series has seven easy 5 minute installments. This first installment: The Nature of the French Empire.

Introduction
Elsewhere on this site we presented a complete book on this important explorer. The Mississippi River is arguably the most important river in the North American continent. Any empire that could join that river system to the Saint Lawrence River system would hav a stranglehold on the continent. This is what La Salle established for France. That country failed to build on the foundation that La Salle gave it.

Apart from geo-political power, the exploration of this river presented an important addition to human knowledge.

We use Tuesdays, to present installments from a single book, eventually reprinting the entire book. The rest of the time we present excerpts from works that are in effect short stories. This series is like the short story version while Mr. Parkman’s Tuesdays are the full book-length version.

This selection is from Histoire du Canada by François Xavier Garneau published in 1848. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

François Xavier Garneau (1809-1866) was Canadian, poet, civil servant and liberal who wrote a three-volume history of the French Canadian nation entitled Histoire du Canada between 1845 and 1848.

Time: 1673-1682
Place: Mouth of the Mississippi River

During the early colonization of New France, in the era of Count Frontenac, a remarkable spirit of adventure and discovery manifested itself in Canada among both clerics and laymen. This enterprise, in seeking to open up and colonize the country, indeed, showed itself under each successive governor, from the first settlement of Québec, in 1608, down to the fall, in 1759, of the renowned capital on the St. Lawrence. In the entailed arduous labor, full as it was of hazard and peril, the pathfinders of empire in the New World, besides laymen, were largely the Jesuit missionaries.

This spirit of adventure specially began to show itself in the colony at the period when M. Talon became intendant, when the government of New France, at the time of Louis XIV’s minister, Colbert, became vested directly in the French crown. Through Talon’s instrumentality the colony revived, and by his large-minded policy its commerce, which had fallen into the hands of a company of monopolists, was in time set free from many of its restrictions.

Before Talon quitted the country, he took steps to extend the dominion of France in the New World toward Hudson’s Bay, and westward, in the direction of the Great Lakes. In 1671 he dispatched a royal commissioner to Sault Ste. Marie, at the foot of Lake Superior, to assemble the Indians of the region and induce them to place themselves under the protection, and aid the commerce, of the French King.

While thus engaged, the commissioner heard of the Mississippi River from the Indians; and Talon entrusted the task of tracking its waters to Father Marquette and to M. Joliet, a merchant of Québec. With infinite toil these two adventurous spirits reached the great river they were in search of, and explored it as far south as the Arkansas. Here unfriendly Indian tribes compelled them to return, without being permitted to trace the mighty stream to its outlet. This, however, is supposed to have been accomplished, in 1682, by Robert Cavalier, Sieur de la Salle, a daring young Frenchman, who descended the Mississippi, it is currently believed, to the Gulf of Mexico, naming the whole region Louisiana, in honor of Louis XIV.

Whether La Salle actually explored the great river to its mouth is, among historians, still a moot point. It is supposed that early in his adventures he retraced his steps and returned to Canada, where, as well as in France, he had numerous detractors, among whom was De la Barre, the then Governor of New France. It is known that he was soon again in Québec, to meet his enemies, which he did successfully, after which he proceeded to France. Here he was royally received by the King, and, as a proof of the monarch’s confidence in him, La Salle was entrusted with the command of a colonizing expedition which was sent to Louisiana by sea.

This expedition never reached its destination, for differences with the commander of the vessels (Beaujeu) interfered with the direction of the expedition. The mouths of the Mississippi, it seems, were passed, and the ships reached the coast of Texas. Disaster now dogged the leader’s footsteps, for Beaujeu ran one of the ships on the rocks, and then deserted with another. La Salle and some of his more trusty followers were left to their fate, which was a cruel one, for disease broke out in the ranks, and famine and savage foes made havoc among the survivors. His colony being reduced to forty persons, La Salle set out overland with sixteen men for Canada to procure recruits. On the way his companions mutinied, put La Salle to death, and but a handful of the party reached Canada, the remainder perishing in the wilderness.

Were we to express in the briefest of terms the motives which induced the leading European races of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who came to the Americas, we should say that the Spaniards went thither in quest of gold, the English for the sake of enjoying civil and religious freedom, the French in view of propagating the Gospel among the aborigines. Accordingly, we find, from the beginning, in the annals of New France, religious interests overlying all others. The members of the Society of Jesus, becoming discredited among the nations of Europe for their subserviency to power — usually exalting the rights of kings, but at all times inculcating submission, both by kings and their subjects, to the Roman pontiffs — individual Jesuits, we say, whatever may have been their demerits as members of the confraternity in Europe or in South America, did much to redeem these by their apostolic labors in the wilderness of the northern continent; cheerfully encountering, as they did, every form of suffering, braving the cruelest tortures, and even welcoming death as the expected seal of their martyrdom for the cause of Christ and for the advancement of civilization among barbarous nations.

From Québec as a center-point the missionary lines of the Jesuit fathers radiated in all directions through every region inhabited by our savages, from the Laurentian Valley to the Hudson’s Bay territory, along the great-lake countries, and down the valley of the Mississippi. Scantily equipped, as it seemed to the worldly eye, with a breviary around the neck and a crucifix in hand, the missionary set forth, and became a pioneer for the most adventurous secular explorers of the desert. To such our forefathers owed their best earliest knowledge of vast regions, to whose savage inhabitants they imparted the glad tidings of the Gospel, and smoothed the way for native alliances with their compatriots of the laity, of the greatest after-import to the colony.

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