René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle (/ləˈsæl/; November 22, 1643 – March 19, 1687), was a 17th-century French explorer and fur trader in North America.

[a] Required to reject his father's legacy when he joined the Jesuits, La Salle was nearly destitute when he traveled as a prospective colonist to North America.

[7][b] La Salle immediately began to issue land grants, set up a village and learn the languages of the Native people, several tribes of Iroquois in this area.

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.

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.

While at the Native village in September 1669, La Salle was seized with a violent fever[e] and expressed the intention of returning to Ville Marie.

[17] 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.

A letter from Madeleine Cavelier, his now elderly niece, written in 1746, commenting on the journal of La Salle in her possession may also shed some light on the issue.

At various times, La Salle invented such rivers as the Chucagoa, Baudrane, Louisiane (Anglicized "Saint Louis"), and Ouabanchi-Aramoni.

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, witnessed by uninvolved parties as to veracity.

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.

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.

[22][23] 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.

The first ship built by La Salle, called the Frontenac, a 10-ton single-decked brigantine or barque, was lost in Lake Ontario, on January 8, 1679.

Afterward, La Salle built Le Griffon, a seven-cannon, 45-ton barque,[16] on the upper Niagara River at or near Cayuga Creek.

In order to help the local Peoria tribe defend themselves against the Iroquois, La Salle and his group built a stockade and named it Fort Crèvecoeur.

A 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.

[32] On July 24, 1684,[11] he departed France and returned to America with a large expedition designed to establish a French colony on the Gulf of Mexico, at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

In the meantime, the flagship La Belle, the only remaining ship, ran aground and sank into the mud, stranding the colony on the Texas coast.

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.

[38] 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.

[citation needed] La Salle never married,[39] but has been linked to Madeleine de Roybon d'Allonne, an early colonizer of New France.

The Encyclopædia Britannica provides this summary of La Salle's achievements: "His claim of Louisiana for France, though but a vain boast at the time, pointed the way to the French colonial empire that was eventually built by other men".

Though he died at the hands of some of his quarrelling followers in the mud of reeds of the Gulf of Mexico lowlands, he was essentially a man of the lakes, of Ontario and Erie, Huron and Michigan...."[42] A sculpture of de La Salle is located on the south facade of the Knute Rockne Memorial on the campus of the University of Notre Dame.

[47] Through an international treaty, the artifacts excavated from La Belle are owned by France[48] and held in trust by the Texas Historical Commission.

[49] The possible remains of Le Griffon were found in 1898 by lighthouse keeper Albert Cullis, on a beach on the western edge of Manitoulin Island in northern Lake Huron.

In 2019, the Discovery Channel featured the story of the ship; divers who were involved in the investigation were convinced that Le Griffon sank in the Mississagi Strait.

[52] Historians debated the site of La Salle's "Fort St Louis" colony, which had been said to be near Lavaca Bay at Garcitas Creek, and was a significant part of the history of French colonization of Texas.