In the end, however, La Salle established trading relations with the western tribes and organized them as allies. To keep the Iroquois off his back he furnished his red friends with more guns and taught them how to palisade their villages against the attacks of their fierce overlords. This done, in 1682 he was able to launch the fleet of canoes that carried a motley company of some fifty white men and Indians, including squaws and papooses, to the desolate delta country at the mouth of the Mississippi River. There, he erected a cross, sang the Te Deum and gave the name of “Louisiana” to the vast domain he now claimed in the name of France. Then he re-embarked with his company for the Illinois country.
It was a tortuous voyage back up the river. La Salle sickened and nearly died. Recovering at last, he went on to France where he organized and embarked on the expedition that was to end his short but historic career.
After setting out for the Gulf of Mexico with a well-equipped fleet of ships and a full complement of traders and their families, La Salle was first attacked by the Spaniards; then he failed to locate the mouth of the Mississippi. In final desperation he built a palisaded fort hundreds of miles west of his goal on what is now called Matagorda Bay. In that strange country the young French leader was killed by discontents among his own men following an argument over the apportionment of some buffalo meat.
But La Salle’s grand scheme did not die with him. While the Spaniards, who carried on a flourishing business in hides in New Mexico, were not long in searching out all that remained of the French colony and taking over the neighboring country called “Texas,” they didn’t occupy the strategic region about the mouth of the Mississippi River. By 1699 Pierre le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, a Canadian, had planted a colony on Biloxi Bay in what is now Mississippi, and in another three years a strongly palisaded fort was built close by at Mobile, to become the capital of Louisiana.
French trading citadels soon dotted the Mississippi valley—New Orleans in the delta, Forts Rosalie, Chartres and St. Antoine to comprehend the length of the great river itself, Fort d’Huiller on the Minnesota, Pimitoui on the Illinois, and Fort Orleans on the Missouri. Half-breed camps, conglomerate communities sprang up—Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Natchez, Natchitoches, and others. The natives, and even the outlawed coureurs des bois, found ready, local markets for their peltries in exchange for trade goods and supplies. And, while deep-laden canoes and company boats plied the alluvial waters of the Mississippi River to and from its mouth, ships from France set a course direct to the Gulf of Mexico—to the new French fur emporium in America.
In the meantime, the main path of the fur traders, the line of communication between Canada and Louisiana, was shortened by a far-sighted Gascon merchant named Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac. When he palisaded his trading citadel at Detroit in 1699, on the strait connecting Lake Erie and Lake Huron, he brought about such a concentration of Indian commerce and military power in those parts that within a few years portages between streams feeding western Lake Erie and the Ohio River could be effected with relative safety from Iroquois attack. And, when French fur traders began dipping their paddles in the Ohio River, thousands of square miles of territory were added to France’s mid-continent conquest.
Not only had the French completely encircled the English colonies strung out along the Atlantic seaboard, they had now begun to spread their occupation eastward toward the Appalachian Mountains, behind which they hoped to contain the English permanently.
Meanwhile, trail-blazing traders from Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York had come upon the Appalachians and were searching out that mountainous barrier to further westward expansion.
Sir William Berkeley, Governor of Virginia, had an especial interest in the mountains and the country beyond. As agent in America for the Hudson’s Bay Company he hoped to help break the French monopoly on the hinterland trade by exploiting the western territory from Virginia. As early as 1669 he sent out John Lederer, a German, who ranged the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge, north and south, for many miles. Even before that, Abraham Wood and other traders with commissions from the governor had bartered far to the southwest among the headwaters of Carolina coastal rivers.