La Salle's memorials, which recall by way of introduction his five
journeys of upward of five thousand leagues, in great part on foot,
through more than six hundred leagues of unknown country among savages and
cannibals, and at the cost of one hundred and fifty thousand francs, and
which propose projects that seem in some of their features quixotic and
visionary, received favorable consideration of the king and his minister
Colbert's son. La Salle's wilderness empire is restored to him and he is
granted four ships in which to carry soldiers, mechanics, and laborers to
establish a fort and colony at the mouth of the Mississippi, to open up
all the interior of America from the south, and incidentally to make war
on the Spaniards (who were claiming the gulf for their own), and to seize
their valuable mines.
The quarrellings of this expedition (due in part to the divided command);
the failure to find the mouth of the Mississippi since, we are told, La
Salle had been unable in 1682 to determine its longitude; the landing on
the shores of Texas, far beyond the mouth of the Mississippi; the loss of
one of the vessels to the Spanish, the wreck of two others, and the return
of the fourth to France; the miserable fate of the colony left on those
desolate shores; the long search of La Salle and his companions for the
"fatal river"--these make a dismal story whose details cannot be rehearsed
here, a story whose tragic end was the murder of La Salle by one of his
own disaffected followers in March, 1687, on the banks of the Trinity
River.
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