LA SALLE ON THE MISSISSIPPI, 1682.—The voyage of Marquette and Joliet was of the greatest importance to France. Yet the only man who seems to have been fully awake to its importance was La Salle. If the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, a new and boundless Indian trade lay open to Frenchmen. But did it flow into the Gulf? That was a question La Salle proposed to settle; but three heroic attempts were made, and two failures, which to other men would have been disheartening, were endured, before he passed down the river to its mouth in 1682. [7]
LOUISIANA.—Standing on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, La Salle put up a rude cross, nailed to it the arms of France, and, in the name of the French king, Louis XIV, took formal possession of all the region drained by the Mississippi and its branches. He named the country Louisiana.
La Salle knew little of the extent of the region he thus added to the possessions of France in the New World. But the claim was valid, and Louisiana stretched from the unknown sources of the Ohio River and the Appalachian Mountains on the east, to the unknown Rocky Mountains on the west, and from the watershed of the Great Lakes on the north, to the Gulf of Mexico on the south.
LA SALLE ATTEMPTS TO OCCUPY LOUISIANA, 1682.—But the great work La Salle had planned was yet to be done. Louisiana had to be occupied.
A fort was needed far up the valley of the Mississippi to overawe the
Indians and secure the fur trade. Hurrying back to the Illinois River, La
Salle, in December, 1682, on the top of a steep cliff, built a stockade
and named it Fort St. Louis.
A fort and city also needed to be built at the mouth of the Mississippi to keep out the Spaniards and afford a place whence furs floated down the river might be shipped to France. This required the aid of the king. Hurrying to Paris, La Salle persuaded Louis XIV to help him, and was sent back with four ships to found the city.
LA SALLE IN TEXAS, 1684.—But the little fleet missed the mouth of the river and reached the coast of Texas. There the men landed and built Fort St. Louis of Texas. Well knowing that he had passed the river, La Salle left some men at the fort, and with the rest started on foot to find the Mississippi—but never reached it. He was murdered on the way by his own men.
[Illustration: LA SALLE'S HOUSE (CANADA) IN 1900.]
Of the men left in Texas the Indians killed some, and the Spaniards killed or captured the rest, and the plans of this great explorer failed utterly. [8]
BILOXI.—La Salle's scheme of founding a city near the mouth of the Mississippi, however, was carried out by other men. Fear that the English would seize the mouth of the river led the French to act, and in 1699 a gallant soldier named Iberville (e-ber-veel') built a small stockade and planted a colony at Bilox'i on the coast of what is now Mississippi.