The French in Texas: History, Migration, Culture

By François Lagarde

A surprising history of explorers, pirates, priests, artists, and more: “The best overall study of the French experience in Texas ever assembled.” —Jack Jackson, editor of Texas by Terán
 
The flag of France is one of the six flags that have flown over Texas, but all that many people know about the French presence in Texas is the ill-fated explorer Cavelier de La Salle, fabled pirate Jean Lafitte, or Cajun music and food. Yet the French have made lasting contributions to Texas history and culture that deserve to be widely known and appreciated.
 
In this book, François Lagarde and thirteen other experts present original articles that explore the French presence and influence on Texas history, arts, education, religion, and business from the arrival of La Salle in 1685 to the dawn of the twenty-first century. Each article covers an important figure or event in the France-Texas story. The historical articles thoroughly investigate early French colonists and explorers; the French pirates and privateers; the Bonapartists of Champ-d’Asile; the French at the Alamo; Dubois de Saligny and French recognition of the Republic of Texas; the nineteenth-century utopists of Icaria and Reunion; and the French Catholic missions. Other articles deal with French immigration in Texas, including the founding of Castroville; Cajuns in Texas; and the French economic presence in Texas today—the first such study ever published. The remaining articles look at painters Théodore and Marie Gentilz; sculptor Raoul Josset; French architecture in Texas; French travelers from Théodore Pavie to Simone de Beauvoir who have written on Texas; and the French heritage in Texas education.
 
Includes more than seventy photos and illustrations

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780292777934

Book preview

Introduction

FRANÇOIS LAGARDE

The French presence in Texas began more than three centuries ago, and that migration has continued ever since. But unlike German migration to the area, the French presence in Texas has been nearly invisible, so small that it takes a Frog to notice it. And except for Six Flags, the pirate Laffite, the Pig War, and perhaps Schlumberger or Alcatel, the history of French people in Texas is not well known today. This book tells that history.

The boundaries of Texas were not well defined before the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, and equally ill-defined is the notion of who and what is French. French may refer to nationality, nativity, ethnicity, education, language, culture, parentage, allegiance, ownership, naturalization, and ancestry. An eighteenth-century, first-generation French explorer from Quebec, a 1910 Cajun from Beaumont, Texas, a black French citizen from Martinique, or a Parisian engineer of the past decade can all be called French, or francophone, but with quite different meanings. Today, one can encounter French citizens born in Texas from French nationals who have never been to France and do not speak a word of French, as well as people who have spent most of their lives in France but who are not French citizens. To be scientific, or even nationalistic, would reduce the definition of French to those only born and raised in France, but such a restriction would eliminate those who are not French by birth but by parentage, language, or culture. And since one does not wish to argue about illusory degrees of Frenchness, this book employs a broad interpretation, to include the French from France as well as their North American counterparts from Quebec to Louisiana and Texas.

For the 1968 Hemisfair in San Antonio, the Institute of Texan Cultures published brochures on Texas ethnic groups (a somehow frightening expression), including a fine one entitled The French Texans. French Texan was better than Franco-Texan, considering that the institute had to match Hemisfair’s international flair with a multicultural, multi-ethnic history of Texas. The book included some individuals who were native-born first or second generation and therefore culturally American or Canadian and not French, as well as some French-born historical figures who had lived in Texas for only a few weeks. Some French Texans were rediscovered later, such as sculptors Raoul Josset and Emile Bourdelle or El Paso’s consular correspondent Jean-Marie Romagny. But the book brought together for the first time the French people who had left their imprint on Texas.¹

In 1995, the remains of La Salle’s ship La Belle were found by archaeologists of the Texas Historical Commission, and the following year its cannons were uncovered, signs that a French past was being rediscovered. In March 2001, a symposium entitled French in Texas: History, Migration, Culture took place in Austin. There, French was related to everything French in Texas or about Texas, from the dreams and wrecks of La Salle, Champ d’Asile, and Reunion to the 1920s French pulp fiction on Texas cowboys and Indians, Alcatel’s growth in Dallas, Alliances Françaises, and the French campaign against the death penalty in Texas.

In this book on the French in Texas we endeavor to offer a complete view of what some might think to be a minor note in the state’s history. But in truth, the French presence is woven deeply if subtly into the tapestry of Texas life and lore. It deserves further research, in particular on immigration during the twentieth century.

The state seal of Texas displays each of the six national flags that have flown over the region during its history. The French flag is the second of the six, after Spain and before Mexico, and it recognizes La Salle’s landing at Matagorda Bay in 1685. Texas was French until La Salle died in 1687, and it became French for a second brief period—this time not represented on the fleur-de-lis flag—when Louisiana was returned to France in 1801 in the Treaty of Aranjuez and sold in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. These French claims on Texas were diplomatic and quite symbolic. But they bore important consequences on the history of Texas. After La Salle’s landing, the Spanish built missions and presidios in east Texas to stop the French from entering, and their actions had the effect of bringing Texas even more under Spanish control.

Cavelier de La Salle became the first French official to reach Texas when in 1685 he led about 280 colonists. The extraordinary failure of this first French attempt to colonize Texas became a sort of Alamo in the historiography of La Salle and his companions, a defeat turned into a battle of heroes and martyrs. In the book’s overture, Robert S. Weddle portrays a dark and unflattering picture of La Salle, far removed from the legend and closer to the realities of Louis XIV’s century.

The French continued trying to enter Texas by way of the Gulf coast but had little success, as Weddle and Patricia R. Lemée show in their precise histories of the explorers Bellisle, Béranger, and La Harpe. Many pioneers came at first from Nouvelle France, and the French entered Texas by land, from Natchitoches and the Red River. And as Lemée shows about Juchereau de St. Denis and F. Todd Smith about Athanase de Mézières, the French and the Spanish collaborated more often than they fought when the latter controlled Louisiana after the Treaty of Paris. Unless war prevented it, trade and cultural exchange took place between these two European colonial powers and with some Indians during the eighteenth century.

The French explorers and traders of colonial times were followed in Texas by adventurers seeking their fortunes in a land where force, rather than law, still ruled. R. Dale Olson offers an insightful portrait of the French pirates and privateers in Galveston during the 1810s. He does away with Laffite’s forged Journal and legend and follows the tortuous history of pirates Aury, Pierre and Jean Laffite, Lafon, Humbert, and You. Betje Blake Klier analyzes the tumultuous history of the exiled Bonapartists in east Texas in the light of diplomacy and world affairs and shows how opposition politics transformed Champ d’Asile into a French myth.

France was the first country to recognize the independence of the Republic of Texas in 1839, yet the Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation did not bring an exchange of goods but instead a wave of immigration. Wayne M. Ahr shows that Alsatian-French migration to Texas began with the founding of Castroville in 1844 by Henri Castro’s colonists and that a cultural heritage has been preserved there until this day. The French ethnohistorian of Castroville, Janine Erny, outlines the living conditions in early–nineteenth-century Alsace that were grounds for out-migration.

The French came at first as groups of colonists, exiles, missionaries, and socialist visionaries. Jonathan Beecher explains the splendid and failed history of the Icarians led by Etienne Cabet and of the Fourierists led by Victor Considerant, who attempted to build Utopia in the Promised Land. But if there is a French legacy of importance in Texas, it was bequeathed by the nineteenth-century French missionaries and nuns. French missionaries restored Catholicism in Texas after 1841. They built numerous churches and hospitals in a Texas that is today 25 percent Catholic. They also built schools and academies that evolved into today’s high schools and universities, and they made French instruction fashionable, as Ann Marie Caldwell shows.

La Salle, Champ d’Asile, the pirates, and the socialists ended in relative failure; the first French group to succeed was that of the missionaries and the nuns. Not again until the second half of the twentieth century, when French economic activity would affect hundreds of thousands of Texans, would the French presence have close to the same level of influence.

La Salle, St. Denis, Saligny, colonists, nineteenth-century immigrants, and engineers and entrepreneurs of today’s global market have come to Texas mainly for economic reasons. Work was, and remains, the principal pull for French migration to Texas. Texas was a land of colonization where new fortunes could be found, and Texans and Europeans often cooperated, in contrast to the French colonial enterprise in Africa and South Asia, where colonizers and colonized more often than not fell into conflict.

French migration to Texas is less understood than its history, if only because most immigrants have remained anonymous. François Lagarde traces the flow and progress of that migration over the past two centuries. As with the concept of French, the notion of immigration shows different faces, whether the emigrant becomes an immigrant and whether he or she is French-born or first-generation native. Immigration is a metissage, a transitive process, the stuff for psychologists and novel writers, wrote René Rémond.² Emigration and immigration are of course related, but they tend to produce two very distinct stories. Immigrants evolve and experience change, acculturation, assimilation, and often naturalization. They were French or Alsatian or Norman and became American or Texan. To emigrate, to cut one’s roots to a homeland, used to take up to three months by sea. Now, it takes a day by air. But it takes a lifetime, and even two generations, to immigrate. Today, more than before, French people migrate, or reside temporarily and move again, rather than immigrate, or stay and die in Texas. Carl Brasseaux maps out and explains French- or Creole-speaking immigration of Cajuns and Louisianians to oil- and university-rich Texas. French-born immigrants and American-born Cajuns share, in that sense, the same economic pull.

If French immigration has overwhelmingly been more economic than cultural, some French culture may nevertheless be encountered in Texas. From universities and museums and a Consulat de France in Houston to French companies, schools, restaurants, antique shops, and Bastille Days, French culture is present today in Texas. French art also can be discovered in Texas, just as an abundance of French literature and imagery on Texas is to be found in France. Dominique de Menil and John Schlumberger brought to Houston a beautiful museum and much art and culture, but their fortune made them an exception. The French collections of Sarah Campbell Blaffer and Marion Koogler McNay helped establish museums in Houston and San Antonio. There were, and are, French painters in Texas, among them Théodore Gentilz and Eugénie Lavender, as Martha Utterback explains in rich detail. There have been architects including Paul Cret, who designed the University of Texas campus in Austin in the 1930s. But acculturation erases origins, and Richard Cleary asks pertinently whether there is French architecture in Texas. French travelers from Théodore Pavie to Simone de Beauvoir have written about Texas, and Alexandra Wettlaufer finds how French identity invents an Indian or Texan Other that is exotic and imaginary. To conclude this march through time, François Lagarde sketches a portrait of the contemporary French economic presence in Texas and of its invisible but powerful hand.

Some French figures of Texas history or ethnohistory could have been presented here in more detail. Jean Jarry deserted La Salle and became chief of the Coahuiltecan Indians. When found by de Leon in 1688, he proclaimed his identity with a loud Me francés! Me católico! which is exemplary. The story of the Talon children who came with La Salle and who were made prisoners and became culturally Indian is well known and need not be repeated, but others should be researched. Xavier Blanchard Debray, a graduate of Saint-Cyr Academy, emigrated in 1848 and led a popular Confederate regiment during the Civil War. He is buried a few feet away from Stephen Austin and Ashbel Smith in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin. Emmanuel Domenech wrote wonderful books about his life as a missionary and explorer in Texas and Mexico and deserves a full study. Dominique de Menil and especially Brother Marie-Alain Couturier, who initiated the Rothko Chapel in Houston, also deserve full and non-hagiographic studies. Many French immigrants’ stories, for want of their history, could be remembered and told.

The French in Texas make for an original bric-a-brac à la Menil, a collection of well-known and forgotten people, groups, events, books, works of art, and archives whose common denominators are France and immigration. France has been a powerful and colonial nation, and its interest in Texas was aroused when the country of La Salle and Saligny had a colonial empire. Texas was another potential colony for France, though not in a political sense; Texas was a place to send colonists and colonizing progressive scientists who carried out France’s so-called mission civilisatrice.

The French in Texas have a past, a history long enough that it guarantees them a future in Texas. They also have a present as they migrate and immigrate. Like millions of other migrants today, they experience radical environmental and cultural change. May this book bring them comfort on their voyage.

NOTES

1. The French Texans (San Antonio: Institute of Texan Cultures, 1973).

2. René Rémond, Les États-Unis devant l’opinion française, 1851–1852 (Paris: Colin, 1962), 1:118.

1

THE WRECK OF SHIPS AND DREAMS

A New Look at the Explorer La Salle

ROBERT S. WEDDLE

On April 4, 1687, Spanish navigators probing the inner shore of Texas’ Matagorda Bay came upon a small frigate aground on a peninsular sand bar. Partially submerged, her deck awash, and her masts and rigging having fallen into the water, she bore the sign the Spaniards were looking for: painted on her transom were three white fleurs-de-lis on a blue field, the insignia of the Royal French Navy. Here at last was tangible evidence of the rumored French invasion of Spanish territory led by Robert Cavelier de La Salle. The Spanish diarist penned a description of the derelict vessel, while crews of the two Spanish ships availed themselves of her usable gear and armament: masts, yards, booms, some cordage that had survived the elements, and five iron cannons. Then the Spaniards hauled in the French vessel’s single anchor, which had failed at the critical moment, and sailed away, unable to fathom what lay submerged below decks. Not for more than three hundred years would the ship be seen again and the secrets of her hold revealed to human eyes.¹

In July 1995, the 1687 Spanish diary served to guide archaeologists of the Texas Historical Commission to the remains of La Salle’s ship La Belle (Figure 1.1). A little more than a year later, with the commission’s work of exposing the remains of the ship and its millions of artifacts well under way, another significant find occurred several miles away. An employee of the Keeran Ranch, while clearing brush along Garcitas Creek in Victoria County, discovered the cache of eight cannons that had belonged to La Salle’s feeble settlement—mistakenly called Fort-Saint-Louis—that existed from 1685 to late 1688 or early 1689. The commission, with authority from the Keeran Trust, geared up for another major project. Excavation of the first European settlement on the Gulf Coast between Florida and Tampico went on for two years, 2000–2001. The site, long in dispute despite overwhelming evidence, at last was proved unequivocally, as the outline of crude French buildings, adjacent to the Spanish post established later, unfolded beneath the archaeologists’ trowels.²

1.1    Texas Historical Commission’s archaeologists excavating the remains of La Salle’s La Belle inside the cofferdam that was installed in Matagorda Bay. Texas Historical Commission, Austin, Texas.

These two discoveries, yielding their trove of French artifacts, have focused new interest on the La Salle episode, which has often been treated as a mere footnote to Texas history. Displays of the three bronze cannons from the Belle—bearing the arms of Louis XIV—the cannons from the so-called Fort-Saint-Louis site, and myriad other artifacts in museums around the state have provided the touch and feel of history.

The new contemplation of La Salle and his Texas venture has brought forth speculation as to what might have been the result if La Salle had succeeded. Perhaps, some have said, we would all be speaking French. But one might ask—if La Salle had succeeded at what? That is the very question that has eluded many of his interpreters. There has been a marked reluctance to meet such questions head-on; hence, a general sideswiping of history has shrouded La Salle and his exploits in mystery and in many instances made him out as more of a hero than he actually was. It is time now to challenge the mythical interpretations in an earnest search for the real La Salle.

Space does not permit me to take on the interpreters in any detail. Suffice it to say that their inquiries often have lacked depth, due in part to the complexity of the subject. The picture is clouded also by some of the participants in La Salle’s enterprise who found reason for concealing the truth. This applies even to the one usually considered to be the most reliable source on the Texas episode: Henri Joutel. Joutel, it should be remembered, had close ties to the Cavelier family, and his narrative must be considered in that light. He closely guarded his own role as expedition historian, forbidding others to keep journals, and he is known to have destroyed the efforts of those who tried. On the way back to France following the assassination of La Salle, he left on the Mississippi a lad whom he described as having a loose tongue. Joutel himself then became an accomplice in Abbé Cavelier’s conspiracy to conceal La Salle’s death and the plight of the remaining Texas colonists until all possibility of rescue was lost.³

1.2    This portrait of a young Cavelier de La Salle appears in Pierre Margry, Découvertes et établissements des Français dans l’ouest et dans le sud de l’Amérique septentrionale, 1614–1698 (Paris, 1879).

Putting the interpreters aside, we turn to La Salle himself. Concerning the leader and his short-lived Texas colony, answers are needed to some vital questions. Who was this man La Salle (Figure 1.2)? What really happened in his settlement? And why was the colony here at all? Who were the people who came here, and why did they come? What miscarriage of purpose caused the enterprise to come apart in such a gruesome tragedy? Where did their leader fail them? And how did he fail himself? What were the lasting results of his effort? I endeavor here to answer at least some of those questions.

Robert Cavelier, styled le sieur de La Salle, was, in simplest terms, a dreamer. Driven by a burning ambition, he habitually sought the imagined prize beyond the horizon. Impatient with discipline—or advice, even—he often sought his goals without adequate planning or preparation. Hence, his priorities became hopelessly confused. Perpetually driven to be somewhere besides where he was, he was often absent when his presence was needed most. Disasters—and enemies, and creditors—arose naturally in his wake, attended repeatedly by the wreck of his ships—and his dreams.⁴

It was his natural traits—perhaps they should be called character flaws—that brought him to the Texas coast when he was seeking the mouth of the Mississippi River by sea. It was not by navigational error that he missed the Mississippi mouth but by a naive geographical assumption based on hypothetical maps and a flaming imagination. He acted on his belief that the Mississippi entered the Gulf of Mexico in what we know today as the Texas coastal bend. It was an easy concept for him to adopt—especially when goaded by two conniving abbots in France who manipulated him to their own purposes. They showed him how such convenient geography would appeal to the king and win the explorer the Royal Court’s support for his new expedition.

The means to that support lay in adding a new dimension to La Salle’s plan for expanding his commercial empire by establishing a colony on the lower Mississippi and linking it to New France with a string of trading posts, all to be served by a port on the Gulf of Mexico. With Spain and France at war, King Louis XIV was looking anew at his old dream of seizing the mines of northern Mexico and winning freedom for French ships to sail the Gulf of Mexico, traditionally an exclusive Spanish sea. For such a plan, La Salle’s conclusion that the Mississippi River disgorged into the Gulf at the Texas coastal bend fit hand in glove. With the hundred soldiers carried on the ships and Indian auxiliaries brought down the Mississippi from the Illinois country, La Salle could conquer northern Mexico and make himself a hero. Abbé Claude Bernou, who had assumed the role of La Salle’s agent and who directed his moves, would fulfill his own ambition by being made bishop of the newly conquered territory. Such was the plan, based on a wholly unrealistic concept and imaginary geography.⁵

Totally unsuited for planning and executing any such enterprise, La Salle entrusted the recruitment of his soldiers and tradesmen to contractors more interested in his purse than in providing him with competent personnel. Aside from the engagés, or hired hands, there were gentleman volunteers along for the adventure, a few tradesmen bringing goods to barter with the natives, and individuals looking for expanded opportunity. Among the latter group, a well-documented example is the Talon family, consisting of the parents and five children with a sixth to be born at sea. Encouraged by the sieur d’Autray, who had seen the warmer climes of the lower Mississippi with La Salle in 1682, the Talons left their unproductive farm in Quebec province to return to France in time to join the new expedition.⁶ There were also a few young women—probably no more than five. Presumably, the opportunity they sought was marriage. Only one attained such an objective.

Instead of opportunity, the colonists found a miserable existence in a squalid encampment beside an alligator-infested creek, surrounded by hostile Indians. The place never deserved, and never got, the name Fort-Saint-Louis, a creation after the fact by La Salle’s brother, Abbé Cavelier. There never was a palisade or, as Henri Joutel says, anything remotely resembling a fort. More than half the approximately three hundred persons who landed in February 1685 were dead within six months, not from an epidemic, as is often claimed, but from malnutrition, overwork, and bad treatment—a term that calls for close scrutiny in view of the testimony of the young man whom Joutel and La Salle’s brother the priest chose not to take back to France with them because he talked too much.⁷

What actually happened in this first European settlement in the entire region between present-day Florida and New Mexico is that a constantly diminishing band of French men and women struggled against tremendous odds to gain a temporary foothold in territory that was isolated and hostile. Betrayed and abandoned by their leader, who had become entangled in a web spun of his own deceit and ineptitude, they clung to hope until there was no hope.

In the beginning, La Salle was firm in the belief that he was at the right place, which is to say, at the mouth of the Mississippi or one of its tributaries. Even though he found no landmark familiar to him from his 1682 canoe trip down the Mississippi, he maintained that a western branch of his river must flow into Matagorda Bay. With this idea firmly fixed in his mind, he ordered his two ships to enter the bay. In the effort, the store ship Aimable drifted outside the channel, ran aground, and broke up, spilling her precious goods into the sea.⁸

Nothing could have been of greater importance to the colony than the safety of the Aimable and her cargo. The pilots had advised against having the ship enter the bay at all. La Salle had many times complained of the captain’s lack of trustworthiness. Yet, ignoring all advice—as was his custom—he insisted that the ship be brought in. When the time came, he himself was ashore. From the beach he gave the signal for the ship to get underway. Then the disaster.⁹

The people, with the goods that could be salvaged, were put ashore on the exposed promontory of Matagorda Island to spend a miserable spring buffeted by onshore winds and in a state of war with a nearby Karankawa camp. A few weeks after the Aimable wrecked, the escorting naval frigate Joly set sail for France in compliance with her orders. Her task had been completed when she delivered La Salle to his chosen destination. There remained only the small frigate, or barque longue, the Belle, now the colonists’ only link with civilization and their homeland. Then the Belle, too, was lost.

Severely handicapped by the first ship loss, La Salle had devoted the spring and summer of 1685 to locating and building a temporary settlement farther inland, where most of the company would remain until he had found the main channel of the Mississippi and the site for his permanent installation. His plans seemed to change with the wind. After moving all the supplies and equipment from the landing place to the new site on Garcitas Creek, he had trade goods, tools, arms, and provisions reloaded on the Belle to be taken to the main channel of the Mississippi—when he found it—for use in building the new settlement. Then he left the ship, first on an Indian chase, then on a whimsical westward march that can be judged only as an effort to reconnoiter the Spanish position.

The vessel, her crew already reduced by Indians, lay dangerously exposed to the sudden winter northers. Poorly manned as the Belle was, La Salle left in command a notorious drunk and took off on a supposed ten-day march that stretched to more than two months. During his absence, the enfeebled crew tried to move the ship, which became unmanageable when a brisk norther arose. Swept across the bay, she ran aground off Matagorda Peninsula, where her remains were found in July 1995, to tell a story that does not appear in the history books.

With the loss of the Belle went the colonists’ last hope of retreat. La Salle, acting in character, determined almost immediately to travel northeastward to look for the Mississippi, which he hoped to ascend to his post on the Illinois River—the real Fort-Saint-Louis—without waiting to learn the fate of the little ship. The half-dozen survivors of the luckless Belle’s twenty-seven-man crew reached the settlement a few days after his departure.¹⁰

La Salle, his force riddled by illness, death, and desertion, returned in the fall. He brought five horses acquired from the Cenis, or Hasinai, Indians, laden with provisions for the colony. He undertook a second journey for the same purpose the following January, 1687, taking seventeen men while leaving approximately two dozen men, women, and children in the settlement—all the people who remained alive except for a few scattered deserters.

On this second attempt to reach the Illinois, La Salle paid the toll for his failure as a leader. The bloodbath precipitated by his nephew, whom he had always given more authority than the brash young man could handle, claimed the leader’s life and five others.¹¹

At the post in the Baye Saint-Louis, as La Salle referred to it, the months dragged by without word from the expedition that was supposed to bring rescue. A year passed. Then it was two. No ship came, and no messenger arrived … to offer the colonists reassurance or hope, or to tell them that there was no hope.¹²

Of what went on at the meager French settlement after La Salle’s final departure there is little record. Gabriel Barbier, the one-time Canadian coureur de bois (woods rover) and now a lieutenant, had been left in charge. The young woman he had married, whose name is not of record, bore their child in the summer or fall of 1688—the first known European birth in Texas. A picket fence was completed around the garden plot, making it safe from wallowing and rooting pigs. From the evidence at hand, it appears that the little enclave made the best of its circumstances for about two years, until early 1689. Few if any of the colonists had died. The neighboring Karankawa, long a threat, seemed to have turned friendly, until they treacherously attacked the colony and destroyed it. Only the five children carried away on the backs of the native women were spared, to live adventure-filled lives with few parallels, among Indians, Spaniards, and, again, French colonists.¹³

That is the short version of what happened at the meager, temporary, and unnamed French settlement on the bay that La Salle called Saint-Louis. This, however, is only the middle part of the story. To this must be added a beginning and an ending: a beginning that searches out the character of the man who brought three hundred persons to settle here and, without ever having fought a major battle, reduced their numbers to a mere handful; and an ending that reveals how he abandoned the remaining colonists in their squalid settlement while he and his brother sought to save themselves and their goods. Serious questions arise concerning the leader.

Robert Cavelier de La Salle was born in 1643 in the commercial city of Rouen, the capital of Old Normandy, where in 1431, during the Hundred Years War, an illiterate peasant girl known to history as Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in the town marketplace. Situated on the River Seine, Rouen was heavily involved in the maritime trade with New France, notably the fur trade that was vital to the expanding French colonialism of the period. La Salle would live out his life in the reign of Louis XIV, who had become king at the age of five, just six months before La Salle’s birth. As the France of the Sun King ascended toward economic, political, and military supremacy in Europe, furs from Canada were a significant stimulus to the economy and thus a critical factor in maintaining solvency—especially so at this time, with war the natural state.¹⁴ It followed, then, that the fur trade and Louis XIV’s imperial objectives would become significant factors in La Salle’s life and, through him, vital influences in shaping the history of Texas and the United States as a whole.

Little is known of the childhood pressures affecting Robert’s personality. The middle son in the family of Jean Cavelier père, he seems to have been resented by his older brother, who was named Jean for the father. The friction between them, especially during the twelve years that both were in Canada, seems to suggest an intense sibling rivalry that may have colored the mature judgment of both.

Jean Cavelier the elder was a successful textile merchant who did a significant part of his business with Rouen’s churches. There were thirty parishes and fifty convents in the city, and Jean Cavelier supplied them with altar adornments of expensive material. In high favor with the ecclesiastical establishment, he was elected master of the Brotherhood of Notre Dame. Did this relationship—seemingly as much business as religious—have anything to do with his sending two of his three sons, Jean and Robert, into religious orders?

Both were remarkably unsuited for the monastic life. Robert, after his father’s death, rebelled and withdrew from the Society of Jesus. His Jesuit superiors, convinced that he was too headstrong and self-willed for such a calling, permitted him to do so. Jean, on the other hand, was ordained a Sulpician priest yet never seemed able to reconcile the spiritual life with his material objectives or the devious means he employed to attain them.

Rhetorically, at least, Robert seems always to have held to strict moral standards. Yet his difficulty in personal dealings—his irrational response to criticism and offers of advice—possibly hints at authoritarian parents or other oppressive influences in childhood. In later years, he found occasion to complain of the treatment accorded him by his brother Jean and the little love he has for me. Jean, in fact, was known to betray his brother’s trust. In Canada, when delegated to sell La Salle’s furs and apportion the proceeds among all his creditors, he appropriated the entire amount to satisfy his own claim. Yet the brothers often lived in close proximity—not to say harmony—especially during the Texas episode. It was after La Salle’s death in the Texas wilds that the most egregious index to his brother’s character manifested itself in the lies he told. Indeed these falsehoods may have cost the lives of the remaining colonists.¹⁵

The young La Salle’s withdrawal from the Society of Jesus seems to typify his life’s pattern: he had to soothe his itching foot and slake his thirst for adventure while chasing visions of greatness and glory. He pursued his aims impetuously. Always impatient with discipline, he took giant steps without adequate preparation or regard for the consequences. As the Jesuit father superior might have told him, La Salle never knew quite as much as he thought he knew—of geography, navigation, or the mood and temperament of his followers. He paid dearly for his lack in each of these areas.

Having left the Jesuits in the spring of 1667, La Salle went almost immediately to Canada, where his brother Jean had preceded him by less than a year. Accepting from the Sulpicians a land grant on the Saint Lawrence River above Montreal, where Lachine now stands, he made himself a partisan in the rivalry between that order and the Jesuits. The Jesuits aimed not only for religious domination in the colony but also for monopoly of the fur trade without the corrupting influence of coureurs de bois, the vagabond trappers who were inclined to lead undisciplined lives. La Salle, always given to suspicion, often saw Jesuit connivance in many of the reverses that came his way from multiple causes.

At his seigneury on the Saint Lawrence, first called Saint-Sulpice, La Salle got his first experience as a colonizer. Within two years, however, he sacrificed all his gains to outfit an expedition to seek the great river to the west that he had heard of from the Seneca Iroquois, believing that it might offer a link to the Pacific Ocean and China. This was to be his life’s pattern: to sacrifice the sure thing for a chimera, to mortgage his very being, as it were, for a chance at the imagined bonanza beyond the horizon.

Always a challenge to present-day understanding is that period’s limited knowledge of the North American interior. To comprehend La Salle’s initial concept of the Ohio or Mississippi flowing to the Pacific—widely shared in that time and place—one must understand that no European since Hernando de Soto had seen the Mississippi, and none had seen the mouth of the Ohio. The Mississippi River’s western branch, the Missouri, which rises in southwestern Montana, had never been glimpsed by white men. With news of the western river, La Salle, typically, sprang to action, selling his property at Saint-Sulpice to finance an expedition.

To his displeasure, he found himself joined to a band of Sulpicians seeking a mission field and hence in a subordinate role to the two priests who headed it. Abbé Gallinée, in his journal, made caustic remarks about him that echoed the Jesuit superior of the young La Salle’s novitiate days: his claimed abilities with the Iroquois language proved woefully inadequate, and he was not as well prepared for the undertaking as he had pretended. In short, he never knew quite as much as he thought he knew.¹⁶

A question has often been raised as to why La Salle’s character and capabilities exhibited during his exploration of the Great Lakes region seem to have diminished on the Texas expedition. Such a question surely arises from a failure to examine the complete record. In New France, he was often the subject of ridicule. His inability to learn from his mistakes, his refusal to heed advice, his inclination to blame others for his failings, his irrationality—all these characteristics dogged him throughout his career, in Canada as well as Texas. His own knowledge and abilities, at the same time, never quite measured up to his own claims; nor was he ever able to be the tower of strength that he imagined. In reality, he was destined to be the pawn of superior intellects who viewed him as a useful tool.

When the opportunity arose, La Salle separated himself from this 1669 expedition and went his own way. He was not seen or heard from for almost a year. Thenceforth to the end of his life, his career is shrouded in deceit and obfuscation. Claims on his behalf rest on falsified documents written by others to serve their own ends. La Salle’s own writings were often designed more to mislead than to tell the truth. Claims that La Salle went on to discover the Ohio River after separating himself from the Sulpicians or that he discovered the Mississippi before Jolliet and Marquette—claims made by himself or others—are generally considered false.

In Quebec in August 1670, he was chosen by the intendant Jean-Baptiste Talon to explore the river believed to lead to the South Sea, or Pacific Ocean. He had not reported to Talon fifteen months later; hence, the Jolliet-Marquette expedition went down the Mississippi, proving that the great river flowed not to the Pacific Ocean but to the Gulf of Mexico. Claims that La Salle, during his long absences from the settlements, had reached the Mississippi before Jolliet and Marquette now are generally rejected. Present-day Canadian colonialists tend to deny such claims out of hand, while crediting La Salle with nothing more than a far-ranging and often illegal fur-trading enterprise. His contemporaries alleged that after 1673 he became a front for le Comte de Frontenac’s illicit fur trade, thereby helping the destitute governor-general of Canada recoup his fortunes and providing La Salle with a convenient stepping stone to grander achievements. With Frontenac’s letter of introduction, he voyaged to France in 1674 and was granted Fort Frontenac, on Lake Ontario at present-day Kingston, Ontario, as a royal concession, tantamount to control of the fur trade.¹⁷

Loans from friends and family enabled La Salle to fulfill his obligation to the king