La Salle's Mississippi Expedition (1682): Claiming Louisiana

La Salle’s Mississippi expedition was the French journey that, in early 1682, followed the Mississippi River from the Illinois country to the Gulf of Mexico. On 9 April 1682, near the river mouth, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, claimed the entire Mississippi basin for King Louis XIV and named it Louisiana. The claim shaped French ambitions in North America for the next eighty years, though La Salle’s own attempt to build on it ended in shipwreck, mutiny and his death.

Background

La Salle was born in Rouen in 1643 and settled in New France around 1667, where he became a fur trader and landholder near Montreal. He gained the favour of Governor Frontenac and in 1675 received Fort Frontenac on Lake Ontario as a seigneury. In 1678 Louis XIV authorised him to explore the western part of New France and build forts there at his own expense.

The Mississippi was not unknown. Hernando de Soto’s Spanish expedition had crossed it in 1541, and in 1673 the Marquette and Jolliet expedition had paddled down it as far as the Arkansas River before turning back. La Salle hoped to prove that the river ran to the Gulf of Mexico, not the Pacific, and to open a southern route for French trade that would not freeze in winter like the St Lawrence.

His early ventures went badly. His ship, the Griffon, built above Niagara Falls in 1679, vanished on its return voyage with a cargo of furs. Fort Crèvecœur, built on the Illinois River in 1680, was abandoned by its garrison while he was away. Creditors pressed him constantly.

The voyage down the river

In December 1681 La Salle set out from Fort Miami on Lake Michigan with his lieutenant Henri de Tonti, the Recollect friar Zénobe Membré and a mixed party. Commonly cited figures are about 23 Frenchmen and 18 Native Americans, mostly Abenaki and Mahican allies from the east, including some women and children. They dragged canoes over the frozen portage to the Illinois River and entered the Mississippi on 6 February 1682.

Travelling south, the party met several Native nations. The Arkansas (Quapaw) received them peacefully, and La Salle held an early ceremony of possession among them. Further down they visited the Taensa and the Natchez, whose towns, temples and chiefs impressed the French chroniclers. Relations with the Quinipissa near the lower river were hostile.

In early April the river divided into three channels. La Salle, Tonti and another companion explored them separately and reached open salt water.

The claim of 9 April 1682

On 9 April 1682 the party gathered near the mouth of the river. They raised a column bearing the arms of France and planted a cross, sang the Te Deum and fired volleys. The notary Jacques de La Métairie drew up a formal record, the procès-verbal, in which La Salle took possession of the river and all the lands it drained, from its sources to the sea, in the name of Louis XIV.

The claim ignored the Native peoples who lived there and the Spanish, who regarded the Gulf coast as theirs. It was a European legal act, not a conquest. Its significance lay in the vast scale of what France now asserted, linking Canada to the Gulf and boxing in the English colonies along the Atlantic.

The disastrous second expedition

La Salle returned to France and won royal backing for a colony at the river mouth. In 1684 he sailed with four vessels and around 300 people, including soldiers, craftsmen, families and priests. One ship was captured by Spanish privateers in the Caribbean. Uncertain longitudes, poor maps and quarrels with the naval commander led the fleet to miss the Mississippi entirely.

In early 1685 the colonists landed at Matagorda Bay, in present-day Texas, some 650 kilometres west of the river. The supply ship L’Aimable ran aground and was lost, and the naval escort returned to France. The settlers built Fort Saint Louis, but disease, hunger and clashes with the Karankawa took a heavy toll. The small ship La Belle, their last means of escape by sea, was wrecked in a storm in early 1686.

La Salle made several overland attempts to find the Mississippi and reach Canada for help. On 19 March 1687, during the last of them, he was shot dead by Pierre Duhaut, one of his own men, after a quarrel in which several of La Salle’s loyal followers had also been killed. A handful of survivors, including the chronicler Henri Joutel, eventually reached Canada and France. The fort itself was destroyed in a Karankawa attack around the turn of 1688–1689, and a Spanish expedition under Alonso de León found it in ruins in 1689.

Legacy

La Salle’s claim gave France a title it later made good. In 1699 Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville established a base on the Gulf coast, and in 1718 his brother Bienville began the founding of New Orleans. French Louisiana passed to Spain in 1762, returned briefly to France and was sold to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.

Spanish alarm at the French landing in Texas also had lasting effects. It spurred Spain to send expeditions and found missions in East Texas from 1690, beginning lasting Spanish settlement there.

The wreck of La Belle was found in Matagorda Bay in 1995. Archaeologists of the Texas Historical Commission excavated it in 1996–1997 inside a cofferdam, recovering the hull, bronze cannon, trade goods and a skeleton of one of the crew. It is one of the most important colonial shipwrecks found in North America.

Timeline

• 1643, November: La Salle is born in Rouen, France.
• 1673: Marquette and Jolliet descend the Mississippi to the Arkansas River.
• 1678, May: Louis XIV authorises La Salle to explore western New France.
• 1682, 6 February: La Salle’s party enters the Mississippi from the Illinois River.
• 1682, 9 April: La Salle claims the Mississippi basin for France and names it Louisiana.
• 1684, July: La Salle sails from France with a colonising expedition.
• 1685, February: The colonists land at Matagorda Bay, Texas, and build Fort Saint Louis.
• 1687, 19 March: La Salle is killed by his own men in eastern Texas.
• 1689, April: Spanish searchers find Fort Saint Louis destroyed.

Why it matters

La Salle’s 1682 voyage and claim defined the outline of French Louisiana, the territory whose sale in 1803 doubled the size of the United States. His failed colony, by contrast, shows how fragile such grand claims were in practice and how much they depended on the Native peoples whose lands were being named and divided from afar.