The expedition was commanded by
La Salle, who brought with him his nephew, Moranget. After a delay at
Santo Domingo, which lasted two years, the expedition, missing the mouth
of the Mississippi, entered the Bay of Matagorda, where they were
shipwrecked. "There," says Bancroft in his History of America, "under
the suns of June, with timber felled in an inland grove, and dragged for
a league over the prairie grass, the colonists prepared to build a
shelter, La Salle being the architect, and himself making the beams, and
tenons, and mortises."
This is the settlement which made Texas a part of Louisiana. La Salle
proposed to seek the Mississippi in the canoes of the Indians, who had
showed themselves friendly, and, after an absence of about four months,
and the loss of thirty men, he returned in rags, having failed to find
"the fatal river." The eloquent American historian gives him a noble
character:--"On the return of La Salle," says he, "he learned that a
mutiny had broken out among his men, and they had destroyed a part of
the colony's provisions. Heaven and man seemed his enemies, and, with
the giant energy of an indomitable will, having lost his hopes of
fortune, his hopes of fame, with his colony diminished to about one
hundred, among whom discontent had given birth to plans of crime--with
no European nearer than the river Pamuco, and no French nearer than the
northern shores of the Mississippi, he resolved to travel on foot to his
countrymen in the North, and renew his attempts at colonization.
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