La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (Modern Library Exploration)

Traces La Salle's third and fatal attempt to discover the mouth of the Mississippi

Introduction
Rick Bass
The Jesuits wanted the souls of the savages that inhabited the dark woods for which there were no written maps; France and England wanted the furs and pelts of the animals that lived in those dark woods; and everyone--the Europeans, anyway--wanted a map of the mysterious river that was rumored to drain from the Great Lakes, filled with monsters and whirlpools, wandering all the way across the "new" continent. It's astounding to realize how small the world was, only three hundred years ago, and the ferocity and passion with which the Europeans hurled themselves at those dark woods. Reading this beautiful and meticulous account of La Salle's great adventure (all the more amazing, it seems to me, to have been written nearly two hundred years after La Salle's last moments), you can't help but wonder about the workings of fate and destiny: as if the threads of such things were, for whatever reasons, more fully in the world, back then and once upon a time.

Regardless of whether such a musing is true or not, it seems hard to imagine that La Salle had not been served up by the world to achieve his goal of navigating the Mississippi all the way to the river's mouth. The natives (whose land he kept claiming for France, almost every time he encountered a new view, by merely gesturing dramatically with his country's flag and shouting, or, in Parkman's language, "haranguing," a few, or not so few, eloquent words at the wilderness) could easily have killed him on any of a hundred occasions, and sometimes made serious attempts to do so. His life, however, was nothing if not charmed; he was riding fate and could not be touched. (Even his own countrymen were against him, plotting assassinations, betrayals, poisonings.) It's almost frightening to consider what kind of resolve it took for him to keep going in the face of such pressures, and the cumulative emotional toll this must have taken.

He came to the river, and to the country, as did almost all of the Europeans--filled with righteousness and the brittle, short-lived power of arrogance. At first, whenever he and his crews would encounter altars to manitous, they would expend vast amounts of physical energy and emotion smashing the icons into rubble and then hurling the fragments over the edges of cliffs and into deep rivers. Later, as the wilderness began to wear on them, buffing and sanding them down into some crude and awkward resemblance to a better fit, they would pass such monuments in silence and marvel--beginning, even if slightly, to accommodate their neighbors' differences, and to absorb, perhaps, some spirit of place.

Time and again La Salle entered the river, then was pushed back, rebuffed, tested. Ships vanished, ships foundered, crews mutinied; every time he went into the wilderness, political enemies schemed behind his back, cutting off both his supplies and the king's favor. In the end, or the near end, the only thing durable that remained in him was the dream itself--that unknown, uncharted map--though with each successive "failure," he learned more, and dreamed the dream deeper; and because the Spaniards occupied the mouth of the river, effectively blockading France's own more mercenary dream of cruising downriver, accumulating furs, then sailing across the Gulf bounty-laden for France, the king had no choice, really, but to keep believing in La Salle, for as long as La Salle remained alive.

Parkman chronicles eloquently both the amazing ragtag characters who were drawn into the venture--the prevaricating Father Hennepin, who toted on his back a portable altar for the rare occasions when a service might be needed; the Machiavellian La Barre, sniping at La Salle from behind, harrying him like a hound; the pure of heart Marquette; and the doggedly fanatical, one-handed, loyal Henri de Tonty. With equal mastery, Parkman illuminates the psychological bruisings, the cost of the dream, endured by La Salle, so that near journey's end, it comes not as a surprise but rather as the inevitability of fate that La Salle's strength, his dream, has finally overcome his weakness, and he is beset by the physical manifestations of his life's toil: fevers and depressions and not-undeserved strident paranoias that almost but not quite rendered him immobile.

It seems inconceivable, like something from myth, to consider the bounty as well as savagery of the world through which he passed, mapless--downriver, upriver, downriver, upriver. Where attempts were not made by the natives on his life, he was often feted upon entering the villages. The narrative of his final and successful attempt to explore the length of the river reads like the lightning run at a peak by a modern-day mountaineering expedition; eschewing a large support crew and ships, he instead decided to take three canoes and descended all the way to the coast in that manner--almost single-handedly. Once again, the imagination is strained; who else could know what it must have felt like finally, after so many years, to see the river turning brackish, and then briny, and to smell and then hear the ocean, as he paddled through the low marsh grasses, and to then behold it? As with the Lewis and Clark expedition that would explore the Northwest nearly a century and a half later, the natives, despite having every reason and incentive to eliminate these aliens, instead allowed the wild and curious seed of their own ultimate destruction to enter into their land, disseminated by the great river itself.

La Salle continued exploring after his triumphant discovery; it was all that was in his blood. He returned upriver, to Canada, then to France--perhaps altered in some deep and savage way by the physical and emotional challenges of his goal. Once back in France, he convinced the king and, seemingly, himself, that he could sail from France, enter the Gulf, find the mouth of the Mississippi (for which he had only recorded latitude, not longitude, due to his haste to return, amid the danger of Spanish war parties); that he could upon landing at the river's mouth recruit some fifteen thousand Indians to be his allies against the Spanish (despite his inability to have forged anywhere near that number of allies during the entirety of his travels downriver through the heart of the continent); and that with those hypothetical allies, and a hundred French soldiers, he could overthrow whatever Spanish forts might line the coast, and, with a boatload of willing young men and women, establish a new French colony at the mouth of his dreams, in the new nation to be called Louisiana.

Explorers have rarely been successful nation builders as well; it's as if the twin impulses, one for ceaselessly wandering and the other for settling down, cannot flourish within the same individual. And clearly, La Salle's genius ran to exploring, not colonizing; in dreams, not war.

Having sold Louis XIV on the latest proposal (and how could the king not be tempted to believe that the man who navigated the whole Mississippi would also be able to turn the Spanish upside down and deliver to France that "discovered" country), La Salle set out from France in 1682 with four ships during the worst possible weather for sailing, July. His fever beset him again, as it did others on the ships; sixty passengers fell ill in the stifling heat. When they landed on an island to recuperate, another mutiny occurred as La Salle lay writhing near death in a hut with only two or three companions by his side, while a great number of his sailors howled and sang at the campfire outside his hut, celebrating his illness, before disappearing into the brush forever.

He recovered, pushed on, reached the Gulf, overshot the mouth of the Mississippi, landed in south Texas, wrecked a ship, lingered, fought back Indian attacks, made a scraggly little fort of driftwood--and, as if obeying the pattern of...