The White and the Gold (67 page)

The royal decision was known only to three men: the King himself; his colonial minister, the Marquis de Seignelay, a son of Colbert; and La Salle. The secret was closely held during the whole period of preparation. Men might guess that the fitting out of four ships and the recruiting of a force of four hundred men (the King had doubled La Salle’s conservative estimate) had to do with a settlement at the mouth of the Mississippi, but who could foresee the deeper purpose back of it?

Plans of this magnitude are seldom carried out without trouble in the matter of personnel. The Sun King, or Seignelay acting with the royal consent, proceeded to make a mistake as grave as that which put Cartier and Roberval in double harness. The Sire de Beaujeu, a commander in the royal navy, was given charge of the ships. La Salle, as usual, wanted to have every shred of power in his own hands and he glowered unhappily over the appointment, making no effort to get on a friendly footing with the naval captain. Beaujeu developed a supercilious attitude almost from the start and conceived a low opinion of La Salle. He began to write letters to vent his views. “I believe him,” speaking of La Salle, “to be a very honest man from Normandy. But they are no longer in fashion.” In another epistle he declared that La Salle “had spent his life among schoolboy scribblers and savages,” a curious way to describe the epic life of the explorer. “He smells of the provinces,” was the final summing up.

The resentment of Beaujeu mounted when his instructions on sailing
bore no information as to the destination of the expedition. This secret was being held among the King, Seignelay, and La Salle, and the latter was to give the necessary instructions later. The royal captain exploded into bitter complaints over this restriction of his power, particularly when La Salle proceeded to confound him with conflicting hints. One day he would confide to the naval commander that the ships were to sail for Canada. The next day he would contradict this and whisper that the real destination was the mouth of the Mississippi or some other part of the Gulf of Mexico. Beaujeu did not need any further proof of La Salle’s instability. “There are few people,” he exploded in one of his letters, “who do not believe that his brain is touched.”

In the meantime the upper brackets of the personnel were being filled by young nobles who wanted a chance to distinguish themselves and by men of means who desired a share of the wealth to be ravished from His Most Christian Majesty of Spain. Several of La Salle’s relatives were going to sail with him. His glum brother from Montreal, Jean Cavelier, was accompanying him to keep an eye on things. A still younger brother was to be included in the party, and a nephew named Moranget. La Salle would have been much more comfortable without them. Wherever he went he could feel the critical gaze of the Sulpician boring into his back.

The expedition sailed from La Rochelle in the summer of 1684. The smallest of the four vessels, a ketch named the
St. François
, was captured by the Spaniards off San Domingo. There were plenty of other people who came around to Beaujeu’s view of La Salle’s insanity when the latter was struck down with a fever at San Domingo. He went out of his head and raved wildly. Finally a limp and very ill La Salle went aboard the
Joly
, his flagship, and gave orders to drive westward into the unknown waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

La Salle had been unable to fix the location of the mouth of the Mississippi by scientific methods. He had found the latitude by some rough-and-ready way, but the longitude had been beyond him. This is not surprising, for navigation was in a primitive stage. The speed of a ship was still reckoned by the “Dutchman’s Log,” which was inaccurate. As for finding the longitude at sea, a writer of the period
was frank enough to say: “I would not have any think that the longitude is to be found at sea … so let no seamen trouble themselves but keep a perfect account and reckoning of the way of the ship.”

Having nothing definite to guide them, therefore, the navigators of the little fleet took a course considerably south of the route across the gulf which would have brought them to the three-pronged mouth of the great river. On the twenty-eighth of December the lookout man in the shrouds saw land ahead, and some time later the eager eyes of the crews rested on a long stretch of flat islands ahead, behind which lay the waters of a bay of considerable size. At first La Salle was inclined to think that they had located the Mississippi (in some of his notes he calls it the Colbert River, so apparently he had selected this as the name for it), but observations soon showed him his mistake. This was Matagorda Bay, and it lay four hundred miles south and west of their destination.

The story of this ill-fated expedition concerns Canadian history so indirectly that there is no point in recounting it here in any great detail. It is sufficient to say that one of the remaining ships, the
Aimable
, ran aground on a reef in the bay while coming in under full sail, that Captain Beaujeu returned to France in the
Joly
, and that finally the last one, the
Belle
, a small frigate, was wrecked on the river shoals.

Now the colony was cut off from the world in a strange hot land, ringed about by hostile and watchful tribes, with no prospect of early relief. The soldiers and settlers had been landed on the shore and had built for themselves a stockade which they called with a complete lack of originality Fort St. Louis. They had even started to plant crops. The country was flat and marshy and it seemed impossible that there could be gold and silver here. Herds of buffalo could be seen in the distance, but with Indians lurking in the cane-brakes, none dared venture out. They lived on their stores, supplementing them with alligator meat.

La Salle passed the long days in a state of despair. For the first time he had been entrusted with a royal mission and he was failing dismally. He had stranded the hopes of the Sun King for a western empire in the muddy flats of Matagorda Bay. The people he had brought with him from France were dying of the malarial fevers. The recruits he had picked up in the West Indies with promises of a share in the wealth to be won were thoroughly disillusioned and mutinous. They included Duhaut, a man of some substance, and his
colored servant L’Archevêque; Liotot, a surgeon; and a Wurtemberg German named Hiems who had been a pirate and for some reason which remains obscure was called “English Jem.” These men had lost all respect for the high and mighty Frenchman who had involved them in his mad adventure and whose mistakes seemed likely to cost them their lives as well as their fortunes.

A way out of this desperate plight had to be found. This, of course, was nothing new for La Salle. He had faced such dilemmas before and always had found a solution by sheer courage and perseverance. But this time the need was particularly pressing; the royal eye would turn cold and hostile to the man who had won his confidence if he did not emerge victorious from his difficulties.

The only hope left them was to get word back to France by way of the Mississippi. La Salle set out accordingly with a party of twenty men. He was playing again his most familiar role, risking life and limb in a dangerous journey to rectify the consequences of bad luck and his own mistakes. All the actors in the final tragedy were included in the party, his Sulpician brother, his nephew Moranget, and the recruits from the West Indies.

It would have been better if he had decided to leave his nephew with the colony at Matagorda Bay. The bad temper of the youth had won him nothing but dislike and was now to lead to the tragedy which brought the explorer’s life to a close. A party, which included Duhaut and Liotot as well as Moranget, was sent to recover a
cache
of food. There was a quarrel, as a result of which the leader’s nephew and two others were killed in their sleep. It now seemed necessary to the assassins to dispose of La Salle as well in order to cover up their guilt.

This was accomplished two days later, when the leader set out to find what was keeping the party absent. According to a friendly member who went with him, Friar Anastase Douay, La Salle was weighted down with a sense of doom. In his account of what happened the friar says that La Salle talked of nothing but “matters of piety, grace, and predestination, enlarging on the debt he owed God.” When they approached the spot where the conspirators had hidden, a volley was fired from the ambuscade and the leader dropped dead, with a bullet through his brain.

“There thou liest, great Bashaw!” cried the surgeon, emerging to stand above the victim.

The body of the indomitable explorer was stripped naked and
left in the dank reeds and bushes; and above the spot the air was soon filled with the black wings of buzzards.

Thus ended the life of René Robert Cavelier de la Salle, who had compressed into his scant forty-three years more excitement and adventure than any other man of the period. Fortunately the memory of his achievements has persisted down the years while the stories of failure and of the enmities he created have faded away. One hostile belief persists, that he was mad, that an inner demoniac fever had driven him into his excesses of energy and had led to the miscalculations which studded the record of his years. Perhaps he was mad near the end; but certainly it was a glorious madness, for even his mistakes were of the kind which keeps history glowingly alive.

The murderers of La Salle fell out among themselves, and English Jem killed Duhaut with three pistol bullets, after which he strutted about the camp in a scarlet coat with golden embroidery which had belonged to La Salle. The rest of the party, led by the elder Cavelier, finally reached the junction of the Father of Waters with the Arkansas. Here they found two Frenchmen who had accompanied Henri de Tonty in an abortive expedition he had led to find his lost friend. Later they found Tonty himself at Fort St. Louis.

When it was proposed to Louis XIV that he send a ship to rescue the unfortunate remnants of the venture who presumably still clung to their miserable existence on Matagorda Bay, the Sun King refused to do anything about it. The failure of the mad gamble had been a wound to his pride, and the excessive cost of it still rankled. He shook his head angrily. Hoodwinked once, he desired nothing so much as to wash his hands of everything.

But the Spanish Government was not prepared to forget the matter as easily as the French King. Ships were sent out to locate the interlopers. Although they found the wrecks of La Salle’s ships, they did not spy the miserable little fort inside the belt of islands where a few desperate men and women still held on. Finally, however, an energetic leader named Alonso de Leon took a party by land along the coast and came upon the last sad traces of La Salle’s folly. The walls of the fort were broken down, the belongings burned or scattered, the bodies of the last three survivors still recognizable.
A recent Indian attack had brought about this violent termination to the French invasion of the Spanish realm.

Later Alonso de Leon took his band as far north as the Rio Grande River and heard that another survivor had established himself as the ruler of an Indian tribe near Eagle Pass. They lured this resourceful individual—some believe it was English Jem—into paying them a visit and promptly made him a prisoner. He was later sent back to France. The Spanish were actuated in these efforts, not by a desire to help the survivors, but by an angry determination that not a single Frenchman should remain in the well-guarded domain of Castile in the New World.

T
HE period of French rule in Canada divides loosely into two parts. The conclusion of the first is now close at hand. French settlers, living under the firm and heavy thumb of the King, have had a chance to develop this continent of huge lakes and stately rivers with such interference as the Indian wars afforded and no more than an occasional clash of arms with the English colonists. Now the time approaches when there will be open and continuous war with the English for the possession of the continent. The seeds of conflict have been planted. It needs only the commencement of war between the mother countries to set the fires ablaze. The Indians will divide into two camps; little armies will perform miracles of daring; the rich, fair land will know on both sides suffering and dread and despair.

There had been always a conflict of ideas between the rivals. The French purpose was to keep America an Indian country, their ultimate goal a peaceful land of christianized and industrious red men bringing the results of their trapping to French posts, ruled benevolently but sternly from forts planted at strategic but distant points. The English intended to make America a country for white men. They were willing to convert the Indians and teach them some of the ways of civilization, but what they really wanted was the land over which the aborigines had hunted, the rivers where they had fished, the beautiful, bounteous lakes. It had been inevitable from
the start, therefore, that the daring and adventurous French would have to fight the steady, purposeful British.