Louis of the Illinois. On the second of these he was slain in an ambush by a disenchanted follower, Pierre Duhaut, six leagues from one of the Hasinai villages, on March 19, The bloodletting, already begun in a hunting camp, claimed the lives of seven others.
Six of the seventeen who had left the settlement site with La Salle continued to Canada and, eventually, France. Six other Frenchmen, including two deserters who had reappeared, remained among the East Texas Indians. At his settlement site La Salle had left hardly more than twenty persons, with the crippled Gabriel Minime, Sieur de Barbier , in charge.
They consisted of women and children, the physically handicapped, and those who for one reason or another had incurred La Salle's disfavor. Jean Baptiste Talon, who provides the only eyewitness account, relates that after La Salle's departure peace was made with the Karankawas, whose enmity the leader had incurred at the outset; the Indians, learning of La Salle's death and the disunity among the French, attacked the settlement by surprise around Christmas , sparing only the children.
Madame Barbier and her babe at breast—the first White child of record born in Texas—were saved temporarily by the Indian women, only to be slain when the men returned from the massacre. The Spaniards, having learned of the French intrusion from captured pirates who turned out to be defectors from La Salle, sought the French colony with five sea voyages and six land marches.
Fragments of the storeship Aimable were found in Cavallo Pass , where she had grounded, and along the coast. The children were taken to Mexico to live as servants in the house of the viceroy Conde de Galve. A lingering question pertaining to La Salle's Texas expedition concerns the reasons for his misplaced landing.
Documents that became available to researchers only in the s, taken with others that have not been well understood, shed new light on the matter. La Salle, facing a largely unexplored continent, formed his own hypothesis during his exploration of the Mississippi in , then acted on it as though it were dead certainty.
His observations of the river were at sharp variance with maps of the period. With his compass broken and his astrolabe giving erroneous latitudes, as Minet reveals, he oriented himself by the sun, which was often obscured by clouds or fog. Its latitude corresponded with the one La Salle had taken at the mouth of the Mississippi.
La Salle was still not satisfied. Back again in France in , he bribed an important person of influence and presented an untrue, self-serving report of the discoveries he claimed to have made. By such means he obtained, on the twelfth of May of the following year, the exclusive right to explore the area between Florida and Mexico. Hennepin became the first person to describe and draw a picture of the Niagara Falls.
While some of the men were erecting the walls of Fort Conti or Fort Niagara at that spot, others were at work building a brigantine, the Griffon. On the seventh of August, , the little vessel set sail from Niagara on a course for Michillimakinac Mackinac where it dropped anchor twenty days later. On reaching the mouth of the Miami River St. Joseph he built Fort Miami. In January, , his party reached the site of the present-day city of Peoria, Illinois. While the construction was underway, disaster struck Fort Niagara, which was destroyed by fire.
As for the Griffon, it was never heard of again. On the sixth of April they finally caught sight of the mouth of the Mississippi. Consequently he commissioned La Salle to establish a French colony in Louisiana. Though La Salle failed in his last mission, his expeditions built a network of forts from Canada, across the Great Lakes and along the Ohio, Illinois and Mississippi rivers.
This defensive front line established the French territory in North America and defined its commercial and diplomatic policy for almost a century. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives. Famous for his women's evening wear and suits, his line is distinctly modern yet feminine.
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Hernando de Soto was a Spanish explorer and conquistador who participated in the conquests of Central America and Peru and discovered the Mississippi River. After two trials had hung juries in , he was finally convicted of the crime in He served as president from to Willem de Kooning was a Dutch-born American painter who was one of the leading proponents of abstract expressionism.
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