These he met and captured or killed. He then returned to the Illinois, to find the country devastated by the Iroquois, and his post abandoned. He formed a league of the Western Indians to fight the Iroquois, then went to Michilimackinac, where he found Tonty, proceeded again to Fort Frontenac to obtain supplies and organize his expedition anew, and returned in December 1681 to the Illinois. Passing down the Illinois to the Mississippi, which he reached in February 1682, he floated down that stream to its mouth, which he reached on the 9th of April, and, erecting there a monument and a cross, took formal possession in the name of Louis XIV., in whose honour he gave the name “Louisiana” to the region. He then returned to Michilimackinac, whence, with Tonty, he went again to the Illinois and established a fort, Fort St Louis, probably on Starved Rock (near the present Ottawa, Illinois), around which nearly 20,000 Indians (Illinois, Miamis and others seeking protection from the Iroquois) had been gathered. La Salle then went to Quebec, and La Barre, who had succeeded Frontenac, being unfriendly to him, again visited France (1684), where he succeeded in interesting the king in a scheme to establish a fort at the mouth of the Mississippi and to seize the Spanish posts in the vicinity. On the 24th of July 1684, with four vessels under the command of himself and Captain Beaujeu, a naval officer, he sailed from La Rochelle. Mistaking, it appears, the inlets of Matagorda Bay (which La Salle called St Louis’s Bay) in the present state of Texas, for the mouth of an arm of the Mississippi, he landed there, and Beaujeu, soon afterwards returned to France. The expedition had met with various misfortunes; one vessel had been captured by the Spaniards and another had been wrecked; and throughout La Salle and Beaujeu had failed to work in harmony. Soon finding that he was not at the mouth of the Mississippi, La Salle established a settlement and built a fort, Fort St Louis, on the Lavaca (he called it La Vache) river, and leaving there the greater part of his force, from October 1685 to March 1686 he vainly sought for the Mississippi. He also made two attempts to reach the Illinois country and Canada, and during the second, after two months of fruitless wanderings, he was assassinated, on the 19th of March 1687, by several of his followers, near the Trinity river in the present Texas.
His colony on the Lavaca, after suffering terribly from privation and disease and being attacked by the Indians, was finally broken up, and a force of Spaniards sent against it in 1689 found nothing but dead bodies and a dismantled fort; the few survivors having become domesticated in the Indian villages near by. Some writers, notably J. G. Shea, maintain that La Salle never intended to fortify the mouth of the Mississippi, but was instructed to establish an advanced post near the Spanish possessions, where he was to await a powerful expedition under a renegade Spaniard, Peñalosa, with whom he was to co-operate in expelling the Spaniards from this part of the continent.[1]
La Salle was one of the greatest of the explorers in North America. Besides discovering the Ohio and probably the Illinois, he was the first to follow the Mississippi from its upper course to its mouth and thus to establish the connexion between the discoveries of Radisson, Joliet and Marquette in the north with those of De Soto in the south. He was stern, indomitable and full of resource.
The best accounts of La Salle’s explorations may be found in Francis Parkman’s La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (Boston, 1879; later revised editions), in Justin Winsor’s Cartier to Frontenac (Boston, 1894), and in J. G. Shea’s Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley (New York, 1852); see also P. Chesnel, Histoire de Cavelier de La Salle, explorations et conquête du bassin du Mississippi (Paris, 1901). Of the early narratives see Louis Hennepin, Description de la Louisiane (1683); Joutel, Journal historique du dernier voyage que feu M. de la Salle fit dans le Golfe de Mexique, &c. (Paris, 1713); and Henri de Tonty, Derniers Découvertes dans l’Amérique septentrionale de M. de La Salle (Paris, 1697). Original narratives may be found, translated into English, in The Journeys of René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, as related by his Faithful Lieutenant, Henri de Tonty, &c. (2 vols., New York, 1905), edited by I. J. Cox; in Benjamin F. French’s Historical Collections of Louisiana (6 series, New York, 1846–1853), and in Shea’s Early Voyages Up and Down the Mississippi (Albany, 1861); and an immense collection of documents relating to La Salle may be found in Pierre Margry’s Découvertes et établissements des Français dans l’ouest et dans le sud de l’Amérique septentrionale, 1614–1754; Mémoires et documents originaux recueillis et publiés (6 vols., Paris, 1875–1886), especially in vol. ii. (C. C. W.)
LA SALLE, ST JEAN BAPTISTE DE (1651–1719), founder
of the order of Christian Brothers, was born at Reims. The
son of a rich lawyer, his father’s influence early secured him
a canonry in the cathedral; there he established a school,
where free elementary instruction was given to poor children.
The enterprise soon broadened in scope; a band of enthusiastic
assistants gathered round him; he resolved to resign his canonry,
and devote himself entirely to education. His assistants were
organized into a community, which gradually rooted itself all
over France; and a training-school for teachers, the Collège
de Saint-Yon, was set up at Rouen. In 1725, six years after
the founder’s death, the society was recognized by the pope,
under the official title of “Brothers of the Christian Schools”;
its members took the usual monastic vows, but did not aspire
to the priesthood. During the first hundred years of its existence
its activities were mainly confined to France; during the 19th
century it spread to most of the countries of western Europe,
and has been markedly successful in the United States. When
La Salle was canonized in 1900, the total number of brothers
was estimated at 15,000. Although the order has been chiefly
concerned with elementary schools, it undertakes most branches
of secondary and technical education; and it has served as a
model for other societies, in Ireland and elsewhere, slightly
differing in character from the original institute.
LA SALLE, a city of La Salle county, Illinois, U.S.A., on the
Illinois river, near the head of navigation, 99 m. S.W. of Chicago.
Pop. (1900) 10,446, of whom 3471 were foreign-born; (1910
census) 11,537. The city is served by the Chicago, Burlington
& Quincy, the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific, and the Illinois
Central railways, and by the Illinois & Michigan Canal, of
which La Salle is the western terminus. The city has a public
library. The principal industries are the smelting of zinc and
the manufacture of cement, rolled zinc, bricks, sulphuric acid
and clocks; in 1905 the city’s factory products were valued
at $3,158,173. In the vicinity large quantities of coal are mined,
for which the city is an important shipping point. The municipality
owns and operates the waterworks and the electric lighting
plant. The first settlement was made here in 1830; and the
place which was named in honour of the explorer, René Robert
Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, was chartered as a city in 1852 and
rechartered in 1876.
LASAULX, ARNOLD CONSTANTIN PETER FRANZ VON
(1839–1886), German mineralogist and petrographer, was born
at Castellaun near Coblenz on the 14th of June 1839. He was
educated at Berlin, where he took his Ph. D. in 1868. In 1875
he became professor of mineralogy at Breslau, and in 1880
professor of mineralogy and geology at Bonn. He was distinguished
for his researches on minerals and on crystallography,
and he was one of the earlier workers on microscopic petrography.
He described in 1878 the eruptive rocks of the district of Saar
and Moselle. In 1880 he edited Der Aetna from the MSS. of
Dr W. Sartorius von Waltershausen, the results of observations
made between the years 1834–1869. He was author of Elemente
der Petrographie (1875), Einführung in die Gesteinslehre (1885),
and Précis de pétrographie (1887). He died at Bonn on the
25th of January 1886.
- ↑ Although La Salle and Don Diego de Peñalosa (1624–1687) presented to the French government independent plans for an expedition against the Spaniards and Peñalosa afterwards proposed their co-operation, there is no substantial evidence that this project was adopted. Parkman is of the opinion that La Salle proposed his expedition against the Spaniards in the hope that the conclusion of peace between France and Spain would prevent its execution and that he might then use the aid he had thus received in establishing a fortified commercial colony at the mouth of the Mississippi. See E. T. Miller, “The Connection of Peñalosa with the La Salle Expedition,” in the Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, vol. v. (Austin, Tex., 1902).
