When the expedition finally sailed from LaRochelle in the summer of 1684, it quickly ran into trouble. La Salle, not trusting any of the captains aboard the ships, had tried to fix the location of the Mississippi all by himself. He had somehow hit on the correct latitude, but the longitude was beyond him. Since they had no correct course to sail by, the navigators of the little expedition ran too far south. One of the ships was captured by the Spanish off Santo Domingo, and not until December 28 did the others reach land, though the Mississippi was nowhere in sight. They had, in fact, landed in Matagorda Bay, halfway between today’s Galveston and Corpus Christi, on the Texas Gulf Coast, nearly 400 miles off their intended destination.
From that point on their problems only increased. One ship ran aground on a reef in the bay; Captain Beaujeu returned to France with another, and the last ship was finally wrecked during a storm. The expedition was now suddenly cut off from the world in a strange, hot land, surrounded by watchful and hostile Indians. They began building a stockade which they called, with great originality, Fort St. Louis; in the distance they could see herds of buffalo, but with Indians lurking everywhere, no one dared to venture out. Instead they lived on their supplies which they supplemented with occasional alligator meat.
La Salle was in complete despair. For the first time he had been entrusted with a royal commission, and here he was, failing dismally, having stranded the hopes of his king in the muddy flats of this bay. Some of his people were already dying of malarial fevers, and the recruits they had picked up in the West Indies with a promise of a share of the wealth to be won, were all thoroughly disillusioned and near mutiny. Everyone was angry at their arrogant leader who had involved them in this mad adventure which might now cost them their lives, not even to mention the promised fortunes.
But La Salle had been in dilemmas before, and he had always found a way out. This time there was all the more reason to come up with a solution, for the royal anger would surely fall heavily on the man who had so deceived his king. La Salle, therefore, set out with about twenty men, desperately hoping to find his way to the Mississippi and begin over again. Only this time his luck had run out permanently. Along the way his men got into a fight among themselves, and in the ensuing scuffle La Salle was shot to death.
When news of this fiasco finally reached France, Louis XIV, bitter and wounded in his pride, refused to permit any efforts to rescue the stranded party. But the Spanish government had already sent out a fleet to intercept the trespassers on New Spain; when they finally found the miserable little fort in Matagorda Bay, its walls had been broken down, the equipment and supplies scattered and burned, and only a few barely recognizable bodies were found. The Indians of the area had already ended this first invasion on New Spain.
Despite Louis XIV’s anger at having been misled by La Salle, the French government was not entirely willing to give up the advantages gained by his explorations. Fifteen years later, Pierre le Mogue, Sieur d’Iberville, sailed to the Gulf coast with four ships and 200 colonists. At a point where Biloxi now stands, they erected a fort and a small settlement. But like all small outposts, this little colony struggled from the beginning with the ever-present food shortages and the fever marshes in the area, until in 1710 they finally moved the settlement to the site of today’s Mobile. Eight years later New Orleans was begun, and that town soon became the center and capital of the Louisiana territory. The colony thereafter began to prosper and the population increased until, by 1731, La Salle’s dream had become reality. In that year, Louisiana contained about 5,000 white settlers and nearly 2,000 African slaves.
By that time the French had also begun to occupy the Great West. Within less than two decades after La Salle’s death, in fact, there already stretched a line of forts down the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers, which united the French possessions in Canada and Louisiana. In 1701, Detroit was fortified, and from there another line of forts extended westward from Lake Superior almost to the Rocky Mountains.