Read Lone Star Nation for Free Online

tributaries, and christened it Louisiana.
    Such a feat would have satisfied most men, but La Salle burned with ambition augmented by financial ruin, brought on by unwise investments in the fur trade and by La Salle’s general lack of business savvy. He prepared to plant a colony near the mouth of the Mississippi, which would win him royal favor and allow him to corner the commerce of Louisiana. With a fleet of four ships and 280 sailors and colonists he left France in the summer of 1684. One of the craft was captured by the Spanish (with whom the French had recently been at war and who failed to receive, or simply ignored, the news that the war had ended), but the other three penetrated far into the Gulf of Mexico, till then a Spanish lake. Perhaps puzzlingly to a later generation, finding the largest river of North America posed a genuine challenge. The details of determining longitude still defied the best explorers and navigators (and would do so till the invention of accurate chronometers almost a century hence), with the consequence that La Salle did not know where either he or the river was. Complicating matters further, in its lower reaches the big river split into a number of smaller streams, no one of which was irrefutably impressive.
    As a result, La Salle erred badly in picking a spot for landing. He entered Matagorda Bay—six degrees of longitude and four hundred miles west of the Mississippi—thinking he was
east
of his goal. The landing itself was a fiasco. One of his ships foundered in the shallow channel; most of its stores were lost. Indians captured several of the colonists, commencing a chain of hostilities that sapped the numbers and morale of the colonists. Provisions dwindled, but when the captain of La Salle’s fleet volunteered to sail to the West Indies for relief, La Salle rejected the offer, telling him to depart and not return. After the captain left, taking some disaffected colonists with him, La Salle’s last vessel was blown ashore and wrecked, stranding the colonists.
    They planted crops, which succumbed to drought. Water ran short; scurvy set gums bleeding. Dysentery and other infectious diseases decimated the ranks of the men, women, and children. A rattlesnake claimed the life of one colonist; another man drowned setting a fishnet. An alligator ate yet another. “It seemed as if there was a curse upon our labors,” recalled one of the survivors.
    Yet the worst of the colony’s troubles was La Salle himself. He acted as judge, jury, and executioner—literally, when he convicted and hanged an attempted deserter. “No one tells him anything,” remarked an expedition engineer. “This is a man who has lost his mind.”
    Imprudently but unavoidably, La Salle left the settlement for months at a time, trying to figure out where he was. He traveled far to the west, perhaps reaching the Rio Grande. He traveled east, to the land of the Hasinai, or Tejas, Indians (who subsequently gave their name—rendered in English as Texas—to the region). Eventually he discovered his navigational mistake and struck out overland for the fort—St. Louis—he had previously established near the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers. En route several of his men, exasperated beyond endurance by his despotic behavior, murdered him and his few remaining loyalists.
    Those left at La Salle’s settlement tried to make peace with the local Karankawa Indians. But after the natives realized that La Salle wasn’t coming back, they descended on the fort and killed everyone there, except five children who were taken captive and forcibly adopted into the tribe.

    The adoption, as it turned out, was temporary, for when the Spanish learned that La Salle had penetrated their private sea, they commenced a manhunt for the French explorer. He proved to be even harder for them to find than the mouth of the Mississippi had been for him; six overland