"Ohio" expedition The Seneca told La Salle of a great river, called the
Ohio, which flowed into the sea, the "Vermilion Sea". He began to plan for expeditions to find a western passage to China. He sought and received permission from Governor
Daniel Courcelle and
Intendant Jean Talon to embark on the enterprise. He sold his interests in Lachine to finance the venture. La Salle left Lachine by the St. Lawrence on July 6, 1669, with a flotilla of nine canoes and 24 men, an unknown number of Seneca guides: himself and 14 hired men in four canoes, the two Sulpicians Dollier de Casson and Abbé René de Bréhan de Galinée with seven new recruits in three canoes, and two canoes of Natives. Having travelled up the St. Lawrence and across Lake Ontario for 35 days, they arrived at what is called today
Irondequoit Bay on the southern shore of Lake Ontario at the mouth of Irondequoit Creek, a place now commemorated as La Salle's Landing. There they were greeted by a party of Natives, who escorted them starting the next day to a village some leagues distant, a journey of a few days. At the village, the Seneca vehemently attempted to dissuade the party from proceeding into the lands of their enemies, the
Algonquins, telling of the dire fate awaiting them. The necessity of securing guides for the further part of the journey, and the refusal of the Seneca to provide them, delayed the expedition a month. A fortuitous capture by the Natives in the lands to the south of a Dutchman who spoke
Iroquois well but French poorly, and was to be burned at the stake for transgressions unknown, provided an opportunity to obtain a guide. The Dutchman's freedom was purchased by the party in exchange for
wampum. While at the Native village in September 1669, La Salle was seized with a violent fever and expressed the intention of returning to
Ville Marie. At this juncture, he parted from his company and the narrative of the Jesuits, who continued on to upper Lake Erie. Other accounts have it that some of La Salle's men soon returned to
New Holland or Ville Marie.
Further evidence Beyond that, the factual record of La Salle's first expedition ends, and what prevails is obscurity and fabrication. It is likely that he spent the winter in Ville Marie. The next confirmed sighting of La Salle was by
Nicolas Perrot on the Ottawa River near the
Rapide des Chats in early summer, 1670, hunting with a party of Iroquois. That would be 700 miles as the crow flies from the Falls of the Ohio, the point supposed by some that he reached on the Ohio River. La Salle's own journal of the expedition was lost in 1756. In a letter to the intendant Talon in 1677, he claimed "discovery" of a river, the Baudrane, flowing southwesterly below the Great Lakes (well north of the Ohio's location) with its head on Lake Erie and emptying into the Saint Louis (i.e. the Mississippi), a hydrography which was non-existent. In those days, maps as well as descriptions were based part on observation and part on hearsay, of necessity. This confounded courses, mouths and confluences among the rivers. At various times, La Salle invented such rivers as the Chucagoa, Baudrane, Louisiane (Anglicized "Saint Louis"), and Ouabanchi-Aramoni. Confounding fact with fiction started with publication in 1876 of Pierre Margry's
Découvertes et Établissements des Français. Margry was a French archivist and partisan who had private access to the French archives. He came to be the agent of American historian Francis Parkman. Margry's work, a massive nine volumes, encompassed an assemblage of documents – some previously published, but many not. In it, he sometimes published a reproduction of the whole document, and sometimes only an extract, or summary, not distinguishing the one from the other. These discrepancies have significantly complicated efforts to retrace and build upon Margry's work. He also used in some cases one or another copies of original documents previously edited, extracted or altered by others, without specifying which transcriptions were original, and which were copies, or whether the copy was dated earlier or later. Reproductions were scattered in fragments across chapters, so that it was impossible to ascertain the integrity of the document from its fragments. Chapter headings were oblique and sensational, so as to obfuscate the content therein. English and American scholars were immediately skeptical of the work, since full and faithful publication of some of the original documents had previously existed. The situation was so fraught with doubt, that the United States Congress appropriated $10,000 in 1873, which Margry wanted as an advance, to have the original documents photostated and witnessed by uninvolved parties as to veracity.
Fort Frontenac and the fur trade La Salle undertook several other smaller unknown expeditions between 1671 and 1673. On July 12, 1673, the Governor of New France,
Louis de Buade de Frontenac, arrived at the mouth of the
Cataraqui River to meet with leaders of the Five Nations of the Iroquois to encourage them to trade with the French. While the groups met and exchanged gifts, Frontenac's men, led by La Salle, hastily constructed a rough wooden palisade on a point of land by a shallow, sheltered bay. Originally the fort was named Fort Cataraqui; it was later renamed
Fort Frontenac by La Salle, in honor of his patron. The purpose of Fort Frontenac was to control the lucrative fur trade in the Great Lakes Basin to the west. The fort was also meant to be a bulwark against the English and Dutch, who were competing with the French for control of the fur trade. La Salle was left in command of the fort in 1673. Thanks to his powerful protector, the discoverer managed, during a voyage to France in 1674–75, to secure for himself the grant of Fort Cataraqui and acquired
letters of nobility for himself and his descendants.
Great Lakes forts After leaving Lower Canada in September 1678, La Salle and his lieutenant
Henri de Tonti travelled to
Fort Frontenac (now in
Kingston, Ontario) and then to Niagara where, in December 1678, they were the first Europeans documented to have seen
Niagara Falls; they built
Fort Conti at the mouth of the Niagara River. There, they loaded supplies into smaller boats (
canoes or
bateaux), so they could continue up the shallow and swiftly flowing lower
Niagara River to what is now the location of
Lewiston, New York. There the Iroquois had a well-established
portage route that bypassed the rapids and the
cataract later known as
Niagara Falls. The first ship built by La Salle, called the
Frontenac, was a 10-ton single-decked brigantine or barque; it was lost in Lake Ontario on January 8, 1679. Afterward, La Salle built
Le Griffon, a seven-cannon, 45-ton
barque, In March 1680, La Salle set off on foot for Fort Frontenac for supplies. There, he discovered that only month after his departure, the soldiers at Ft. Crevecoeur, led by
Martin Chartier,
mutinied, destroyed the fort, and exiled Tonti, whom he had left in charge.
Mississippi expedition The group later travelled along the Illinois River and arrived at the Mississippi River in February 1682; they built canoes there. The exploration reached an area that is now
Memphis, Tennessee, where La Salle built a small fort, named
Fort Prudhomme. In April 1682, the expedition reached the Gulf of Mexico. There, La Salle named the Mississippi basin
La Louisiane in honor of
Louis XIV and claimed it for France. During 1682–83, La Salle, with Henry de Tonti, established
Fort Saint-Louis of Illinois at
Starved Rock on the Illinois River to protect and hold the region for France. La Salle then returned to Montreal and later, to France.
Texas expedition and death titled ''La Salle's Expedition to Louisiana in 1684
. The ship on the left is La Belle, in the middle is Le Joly
, and L'Aimable'' is to the right. They are at the entrance to
Matagorda Bay On July 24, 1684, Some of his men
mutinied, near the site of present-day
Navasota, Texas. On March 19, 1687, La Salle was slain by Pierre Duhaut during an ambush while talking to Duhaut's decoy,
Jean L'Archevêque. They were "six leagues" from the westernmost village of the
Hasinai (Tejas) Indians. Duhaut was shot and killed by James Hiems to avenge La Salle. Over the following week, others were killed; confusion followed as to who killed whom. The colony lasted only until 1688, when
Karankawa-speaking Natives killed the 20 remaining adults and took five children as captives. Tonti sent a search mission in 1689 when he learned of the colonizers' fate, but the expedition ran out of supplies in northern Texas and failed to reach the site. It is now known that there were 15 survivors of the original 180 colonists at the fort, most of whom had accompanied La Salle on his final eastward trek to locate the mouth of the Colbert (Mississippi) River and escaped the massacre: five children kidnapped by Native Americans at the settlement and later rescued by the Spanish, and 10 other adults, who lived for a while among the Native Americans and were later captured and released by the Spanish. Six found their way to Canada and eventually returned to France. Three others were refused passage by the Spanish; an Italian was imprisoned. For as long as 30 years after the demise of the colony, there were specious accounts of survivors still living among the Native Americans in Texas. ==Personal life==