Which of the following did La Salle do when he reached the mouth of the Mississippi River on April 9, 1682? Select ALL that apply.

Which of the following did La Salle do when he reached the mouth of the Mississippi River on April 9, 1682? Select ALL that apply.

He named the land Louisiana after King Louis XIV

He fought with the English over the land.

He held a ceremony claiming all land drained by the river for France.

He went to Haiti and started a war.

He held a small Catholic celebration with prayers and songs

La Salle secured a contract for the colonization of lower Louisiana from Louis XIV in 1683. The plan was to reach the Mississippi by sea and secure a permanent settlement upriver that would provide the French with a strategic advantage over Spanish interests throughout the Gulf of Mexico. Two years later, La Salle’s small fleet left the French port of La Rochelle, carrying roughly one hundred soldiers, as well as 280 men, women, and children, and a year’s worth of supplies. They stopped at the French island Saint Domingue before making landfall somewhere between Grand Isle and the Atchafalaya Bay in December 1684. By this point, the expedition had lost the ketch Saint François to Spanish privateers.

Due to a latitudinal miscalculation and severe dissension among the crew, the second La Salle expedition continued west until reaching the entrance of Matagorda Bay in present-day Texas. La Salle sent one ship back to France with news of the colony’s uncertain future. He then led three overland expeditions in search of the missing Colbert River. Most of his companions either died or deserted during the first two trips. In 1687, on the third attempt, several men murdered La Salle and continued moving east until they reached the Arkansas River and then traveled onward to Canada and France. A Spanish search party found the abandoned Matagorda colony in 1689 and surmised that local natives had killed or captured all of the French colonists.

Historians continue to debate how La Salle could have missed the Mississippi River and mistakenly landed in Texas. Still more mysterious is the actual fate of those who joined La Salle on his second expedition and remained at Matagorda Bay. Regardless, the La Salle expeditions represented the first penetration of European explorers into the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Texas since the sixteenth-century expeditions of Pánfilo de Narváez and Hernando de Soto. In 1995, the story of La Salle’s ill-fated voyage made headlines when archaeologists of the Texas Historical Commission discovered what remained of La Belle, shipwrecked in 1686 and excavated more than three hundred years later.