Poor La Salle and His Mississippi Misadventures Quiz

Answer: Priesthood

Rene Cavelier was born in France in 1643 and had the title of Sieur de La Salle. He was frequently called "La Salle" as his recognized name. He was a good student in his youth and in his early teens decided to join the Jesuit priesthood, taking his initial vows in 1660.

However, after turning twenty years old, he traveled to Canada to visit his brother who was living there. After experiencing this frontier life for a while, he decided he was not cut out to be a priest due to "moral weakness".

Answer: Lake Ontario

La Salle was in Montreal, Canada, in 1669 when he heard from the local Native American tribe about the Ohio River. He was told it flowed into the sea, and La Salle immediately presumed it could lead to China! He gathered up several canoes, along with fellow Frenchmen and Native Americans, and spent over a month traveling down the St. Lawrence River.

After reaching a large body of water, the Natives there informed him it was a giant lake and not the Ohio; he was at the southern edge of Lake Ontario.

He became ill with a fever and stayed there until he made his way back to Montreal.

Answer: Beaver

La Salle spent many years in the Great Lake area and succeeded in exploring the area around Lake Ontario, including sighting Niagara Falls. He aided in establishing forts along his journeys from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie to Lake Huron. During this time, he also engaged in the fur trade with Native Americans, where he would trade wampum, often beads and shells, for beaver pelts.

This fur was very valuable back in Europe and was used to make hats and other pieces of clothing. La Salle also erroneously wrote back to France about the many rivers he had discovered, which proved to be false as he continued to search for the elusive mouth of the Mississippi.

Answer: Louis XIV

In 1682, La Salle and several comrades and Native Americans traveled down the Illinois River and found the Mississippi River. They turned south on this river, and explored it while also constructing small forts along the way, including one in Memphis, Tennessee. On April 6, 1682, the group reached the large area where the Mississippi fed into the Gulf of Mexico.

La Salle realized, however, that the topography was going to make sighting the river entrance very difficult from a ship on the Gulf. This would hurt his plans to sail there and build a fort, however, before he traveled back north and on to France, he named the area "La Louisiane" in honor of his French King, Louis XIV, who had helped champion his travels.

Answer: All of these

Four ships had set sail from France in July of 1684 with the goal to sail to the mouth of the Mississippi that La Salle had seen himself two years earlier during his exploration of parts of North America. Almost immediately, one ship had repair issues which delayed the journey.

Then near the Caribbean, the ship "Saint Francois" was lost to Spanish pirates. As they drew close to Haiti, a large group of his men deserted him and defected to privateers. Finally, at Cuba, two of his ships collided with each other, causing them both to become severely damaged.

Answer: Galveston

La Salle sailed past the opening of the Mississippi and and mistakenly landed in Texas in early 1685. After putting some soldiers ashore to survey the Texas coast, La Salle landed the rest of the people at Matagorda Bay, which is called the "mouth of the Colbert River".

Matagorda Bay is on the Texas coast and is protected by a long peninsula that shields it from storms and high tides. However, the bad luck continued as his supply ship wrecked while trying to accomplish this landing. That left him with two ships and only 280 people.

Answer: Creation of maps

Minet was a fellow Frenchman who sailed with La Salle as his chief cartographer. He was responsible for creating and updating the maps of the coastlines and areas they encountered. However, Minet and La Salle never got along and even sailed on different ships to avoid each other. By the time the group was struggling in Texas, La Salle ordered Minet to board the ship heading back to France for provisions.

When Minet arrived back home the king imprisoned him for allowing La Salle to let him "desert". While in prison, Minet wrote up several journals of the expedition and created maps of the area. Meanwhile, La Salle was left with 180 colonists and only one small frigate.

Answer: Rio Grande

La Salle's settlement in Texas was on the right bank of Garcitas Creek and was called Fort St. Louis. La Salle himself only described it, rather than naming it, and said it was "the habitation on the riviere aux Boeufs near the baye Saint-Louis". The inhabitants included two families, some youths, a few babies, and some teenagers.

La Salle left the settlement in October of 1685 and there is evidence he traveled far to the west, reaching the Rio Grande River and even going up it as far as present-day Langtry. He finally realized that his settlement was WEST of the Mississippi and he hoped to later march east to find it.

Answer: Native American raid

In late winter of 1686, La Salle had taken the last of the colonists' ships, the "La Belle" on expeditions around the area. Several of the men died on the trip from eating prickly pear fruit. Upon returning to the ship, La Salle discovered that it had been sunk on the tip of a peninsula during a storm. There was nothing left, and La Salle and his few men had to trek back to the colony.

Meanwhile, back at the small colony, the only people left were women, small children, one infant, and a few disabled men. A local tribe of Karanakawa Native Americans discovered the lack of protection of the "fort" and the small amount of people and raided the locale on Christmas of 1688. They killed all but five children who were adopted into the tribe until they were rescued by Spanish explorers years later.

Answer: A fellow colonist

On one of his expeditions away from the colony he was killed in an ambush by a disgruntled fellow colonist and traveler named Pierre Duhaut. This confrontation took place near a Hasinai village on March 19, 1687. The small group of men with La Salle had become upset over the continual hardships faced by the colonists.

Duhaut was immediately killed by another in the group and eventually seven men died that day in an internal battle. The few who were left, including La Salle's brother, never returned to the site but continued north to Canada and eventually on to France.