Their annual reports are the main reliance for early Canadian history, and they purposely and sagaciously omitted all mention of his enterprises or discoveries, or even his name.
Until within a few years it has been said that La Salle did nothing for the next two or three years after he left Galinée. With such a man that was impossible. We have the briefest knowledge of what he did. His reports and his maps, known to be in existence as late as 1756, are apparently hopelessly lost. In the papers publishing at Paris is one resulting from conversations with La Salle in 1677, when he was in France, a too brief narrative. It sets forth La Salle’s resolve to turn to the south; that Galinée, a missionary, hoped to do good in the north, and in this hope left our hero. “However,” says the narrative, “M. de La Salle continued his journey on a river which goes from the east to the west, and passed to Onontague, then to six or seven leagues below from Lake Erie, and having reached longitude 280 to 283 degrees, and latitude 41, found a rapid which falls to the west in a low, marshy country, all covered with dry trees, some of which were still standing. He was compelled to take to land, and following a height which led him away, he found some Indians who told him that far off the river lost itself in the lower country, and reunited again in one stream. He continued on the journey, but as the fatigue was great, twenty-three or twenty-four men, which he had brought there, left him by night, returned up the river and saved themselves, some in New York and some in New England.
“He was alone, four hundred leagues from home, where he returned, ascending the river and living on game, plants, and what was given him by the Indians.
“After some time he made a second attempt, on the same river,” which he left below Lake Erie, making a portage of six or seven leagues to embark on that lake, which he left towards the north, going through Lake St. Clair. La Salle himself says in a letter of 1677: “That year, 1667, and those following he made several expensive journeys, in which he discovered the first time the country south of the great lakes, and between them and the great river Ohio. He followed it to a strait, where it fell into great marshes, below 37° latitude.”
A letter from M. Talon to the king, dated November 2, 1671, says: “Sieur de La Salle has not yet returned from his journey to the southward of this country.”
A memoir of M. de DeNonville, March 8, 1688, says: “La Salle had for several years before he built Crèvecœur, employed canoes for his trade in the rivers Oyo, Oubache and others in the surrounding neighborhood, which flow into the river Mississippi.”
A plain meaning of all this is that La Salle entered the Ohio near or at one of its sources, I believe at Lake Chatauqua, six or seven leagues below Lake Erie, and followed it to Louisville. He was engaged in the beaver trade, and in 1671 had a credit at Montreal, payable in beaver. We may be pretty confident that, with his twenty-three or twenty-four men and several canoes, looking for beaver-skins, he did not neglect the Mahoning River, first called Beaver creek.
La Salle’s latitude is bad; we would expect that. Joliet’s manuscript map of 1674 lays down the Ohio marked “Route of the Sieur de La Salle to go to Mexico.” The unpublished map of Franquelin of 1688 lays down the Ohio more correctly than it appeared in published maps for sixty years. The discovery was the basis of the French claims to Ohio, and La Salle’s likeness is one of the four great discoverers of America in the Capitol at Washington. But the knowledge gained by La Salle was to be in a great measure lost. The English, stopped by Indians and mountains, were not to settle here. The west and northwest were safer territory for the French. The Iroquois roamed over Ohio, warred with the tribes beyond, even to the Mississippi. The Wabash and Ohio became confounded, often laid down as “Wabash or Ohio,” and most often made running almost parallel with the lake and just about on the high land in Ohio which divides the streams of the north from the south. The magnificent sweep of the Ohio, which embraces our State on the east and south, was lost. The lake had various fortunes. La Hontan made it run down like a great bag half way to the Gulf, but that being in time changed, its south shore was drawn nearly east and west instead of to the southwest westward. No subsequent French writer was so sensible and intelligent as Charlevoix, yet in his great work of three quarto volumes on New France our territory hardly appears, and on the south of Lake Erie in his larger map of it, in 1744, is the legend: “Toute cette coste n’est presque point connue”—this coast is almost unknown.
As early as 1716 the governor of Virginia proposed to the home Government to seize the interior. No attention was paid to it, but about 1750 Pennsylvania traders were pushing over the mountains and the French traders from the west. In that year the Ohio Land Company sent Gist to survey the Ohio. English traders were shortly after at Pickowilliny, Sandusky and Pittsburgh, but not safely so. The French were the strongest. In 1749 Celeron placed his lead plates on the Ohio. In 1753 the French crossed Lake Erie, established Presque Isle and expelled the English from Fort DuQuesne at Pittsburgh. Washington made his appearance to know what the French were doing. The traders had made no addition to science or geography, but they had called attention to the country. But the military expeditions were to rediscover it
Celeron’s map lays down the Ohio quite creditably, but the legend along the lake is: “All this part of the lake is unknown.” Just the mouth of the Beaver appears. He expelled English traders from Logstown, a little above the Beaver. The great geographer, D’Anville of France, in 1755 lays down the Beaver, with the Mahoning from the west, rising in a lake, all very incorrectly, with Lake Erie rising to the northeast like a pair of stairs and the Ohio nearly parallel to it.