On March 17, 1687, two months after the departure from the Bay of Matagorda, on the coast of Texas, which the expedition had reached at the end of January, the surgeon, Liotot, slew with his axe Moranget, Sager and Nika. He was but the cowardly executor of the order of a band of assassins of the rest of the party, consisting of Hiens, Larchevêque and their leader du Hault. Fearing the vengeance of La Salle, two days later, the mutineers determined to make away with him, and on March 19th, between the rivers, San Jacinto and La Trinité, Robert René de Cavelier, at the age of forty-three years and four months, fell a victim to the musket of the treacherous du Hault. [136]
Joutel, who accompanied the expedition and whom Charlevoix met in Rouen in 1713 and described as a very honest man and one of the few of his troop that La Salle could count on, says of his friend in the "Journal historique du dernier voyage que feu M. de la Salle fit dans le Golfe du Mexique, Paris, 1713," written on the notes taken from 1684-1687: "Thus unhappily ended the life of M. de la Salle, at the time when he had all to hope for from his great labours. He had the intelligence and talent to crown his enterprise with success—firmness, courage, a great knowledge of sciences and arts, which rendered him capable of anything, and an indefatigable perseverance which made him surmount every obstacle. These fine qualities were balanced by too haughty manners, which made him sometimes unsupportable, and by a harshness towards those who were under him, which drew upon him their implacable hatred and was the cause of his death." Ferland (Cours d'Histoire t. II, p. 172) has a similar judgment. We have different writings on the death of La Salle: first, the story of Father Douay, the eye witness of the assassination; he gave the details to Joutel, who was not present at the moment of the crime; second, "La Relation of the death of Sieur de la Salle, following the report of one named Couture." This Couture of Rouen, who had remained with Tonti, had learned the circumstances of the assassination of La Salle from a Frenchman. This description shows animosity to La Salle; third, the "Mémoire" of Henry Tonti. The "Relation" of Abbé Cavelier stops before the death of his brother.
All the assassins perished miserably. Liotot and du Hault died at the hands of Ruter, a Breton sailor. Hiens and Ruter were also slain by one of their accomplices. (Parkman, Great West, p. 461.) Larchevêque was discovered in Texas by the Spaniards and was sent to Mexico to work in the mines as a galley slave. Père Douay, l'Abbé Cavelier, Joutel and others finished by arriving at Arkansas and from there they went to Fort St. Louis on the Illinois.
Thus ended the career of one of the most remarkable men of this continent. The lights and shades of this man's story are fascinating but we cannot pursue them. For Montrealers he is interesting in that he, one of their predecessors, it was who discovered by land the Ohio and the mouth of the Mississippi, and the vast district of Louisiana, of which he had taken solemn possession on April 9, 1682, in the name of Louis XIV. It remained for another Montrealer, Le Moyne d'Iberville, to build a stockade fort at Biloxi in 1699 to hold the country for the king, thus laying the first foundations of Louisiana in Mississippi, which soon saw also the forts of Mobile Bay and Dauphin Island. The first governors of Louisiana the brothers d'Iberville and de Bienville, are also proudly remembered as of Montreal origin. It is foreign to the scope of this history to settle the dispute as to how far La Salle discovered the Mississippi. [137] But granting that Father Marquette and Louis Joliet commenced the discovery in 1673, of the upper inland reaches, its completion to the mouth by land must be conceded to La Salle, its discovery from the sea having been made a century before by de Soto.
In many ways La Salle differed very much from the type of men exploring North America at this time. He had little of the traditional gayety and insouciance of the leader of coureurs de bois; he did not seek, primarily, wealth or glory; nor is his life marked with any of the excesses of a scandalous time. This silent and uncommunicative man, of a hardy and uncommon physiognomy, active in body and restless in mind, with those powerful and tyrannical instincts, ever latent, which push strong and energetic natures to the arduous search after the unknown and the vague was one of those characters that feel the need of fleeing from society to go out of themselves and to lose themselves in movement and action. Repose is to them irksome and wearisome. Such men are the victims of the perpetual tempests agitating them and it is no wonder that sometimes they break forth impetuously into anger or brutality against friend or foe alike. Such a one was La Salle; and the above psychological explanation of his career, it seems, is the key of understanding to this original personality.
FOOTNOTES:
[130] Kingsford, History of Canada, II, p. 3.
[131] See R. W. McLachlan, The Canadian Card Money, Montreal, 1911.
[132] To the student of morals and to social reformers, we draw attention to a "mémoire" of the King on March 30, 1687, to Denonville and Champigny, the new Intendant, in which His Majesty does not approve of their proposition to send back to France the women of evil life; that, he says, would not be a punishment great enough. "It would be better to employ them by force on the public works, to draw water, saw wood and serve the masons."
[133] The citadel was also built in 1685. The wooden fortifications were demolished in 1722.