50 Fun Facts About Robert De La Salle

Robert de La Salle's Texas colony put France in the slogan that named which theme park chain?

Six Flags takes its name from the six nations said to have ruled Texas. France's turn, dated 1685 to 1690, rests entirely on La Salle's small and short-lived settlement.

LaSalle cars, named for Robert de La Salle, launched in 1927 as a cheaper companion to which luxury make?

Cadillac built the LaSalle until 1940 as its lower-priced line. Cadillac is itself named for a French colonial officer, so General Motors sold two cars honouring men of New France.

How did Robert de La Salle die in Texas in 1687 while trekking overland to fetch help?

Shot by one of his men, La Salle fell in an ambush on 19 March 1687. The gunman, Pierre Duhaut, blamed him for a brother's disappearance and was himself shot dead not long after.

A 1931 sportswriter's mix-up with Robert de La Salle gave La Salle University's teams which nickname?

Explorers stuck after students voted for it in 1932. The Philadelphia school is really named for Saint Jean-Baptiste de La Salle, a priest who founded a teaching order.

Louisiana is named for which French king, reigning when Robert de La Salle claimed the Mississippi basin in 1682?

Louis XIV, the Sun King, was honoured when La Salle named the whole river basin La Louisiane on 9 April 1682. The name lives on in a single American state.

Le Griffon, the ship Robert de La Salle launched in 1679, was built just upstream of which famous waterfall?

Niagara Falls barred the way upriver, so the anchors, chain and cordage for Le Griffon were carried past it on foot, single file through the snow.

Which French ruler sold America the Louisiana territory that Robert de La Salle had first claimed?

Napoleon Bonaparte sold it in 1803, three years after Spain handed the territory back to France. American officials then argued the sale took in Texas, because of La Salle's colony.

LaSalle Street, named for Robert de La Salle, runs through the financial district of which American city?

Chicago's LaSalle Street ends at the Board of Trade Building. It is nicknamed The Canyon for the tall, steep buildings that wall it in on both sides.

Henri de Tonti, Robert de La Salle's lieutenant, was called Iron Hand after losing his hand to what?

A grenade blew off his hand while he fought in Sicily in the 1670s. He wore a hook under a glove, and some Native nations believed it gave him special powers.

Robert de La Salle's Montreal estate is said to owe its mocking nickname to his dream of reaching which country?

China, la Chine in French, is said to be the joke behind Lachine, now a Montreal borough. La Salle's men were teased as the Chinese when they came home without finding a passage.

When the crew of La Salle's ship La Belle ran out of drinking water in 1686, what did they drink instead?

Wine only dried the sailors out further, and some of them died. The weakened crew then lost control of La Belle in a cold front and ran her aground for good.

Before sailing to Canada, Robert de La Salle spent nine years as a member of which Catholic religious order?

Jesuits trained him from his teens and he taught in their schools, but his superiors found him restless. He was released from his vows in 1667 after pleading his own moral frailties.

Robert de La Salle was born in 1643 in which Normandy city, where Joan of Arc had been burned at the stake?

Rouen was a rich river port with strong ties to Canada. La Salle's father was a wealthy wholesale merchant there, and an uncle belonged to the company that ran New France.

Thick mud preserved which unlikely part of a sailor whose skeleton was found aboard La Salle's ship La Belle?

Brain tissue lasted three centuries because the mud sealed out oxygen. The sailor, a middle-aged man with signs of arthritis, was later buried in the Texas State Cemetery.

Which Spanish conquistador reached the Mississippi about 140 years before Robert de La Salle claimed its valley?

Hernando de Soto reached the river in May 1541 and died on its banks the following year, long before any French canoe came down from the north.

Which pair explored the upper Mississippi in 1673, nine years before Robert de La Salle followed it to the sea?

Jolliet and Marquette turned back far short of the sea, worried about running into the Spanish. La Salle's party finished the journey to the Gulf in April 1682.

The hull of La Belle, Robert de La Salle's wrecked ship, is displayed at a state history museum in which Texas city?

Austin's Bullock Museum opened its La Belle exhibit in 2014. Conservators had first spent more than ten years soaking and freeze-drying the waterlogged timbers.

What does Crèvecoeur, the name Robert de La Salle gave his 1680 Illinois fort after many setbacks, mean in French?

Broken heart summed up a winter of desertions and a lost ship. Weeks after La Salle left to fetch supplies, the men he had left behind wrecked the fort and walked away.

A companion wrote that some blamed Robert de La Salle's sudden fever in 1669 on the sight of three of which animals?

Rattlesnakes in his path got the blame in the sly account of the priest Galinée. La Salle gave the fever as his reason to leave the party, and where he went next is still argued over.

In a 1683 letter, how did the King of France describe Robert de La Salle's discovery of the Mississippi's mouth?

Completely useless was the royal verdict, with an order that such ventures be stopped in future. Within a year La Salle had talked the court into paying for a colony.

What was the family surname of Robert de La Salle, whose famous title came from an estate his parents owned?

Cavelier was his surname and René-Robert his given names. Sieur de La Salle means roughly lord of the manor of La Salle, a title that came with land and not with any feat of arms.

Robert de La Salle's 1684 fleet overshot the Mississippi by 400 miles and landed at which bay on the Texas coast?

Matagorda Bay was a mistake born of poor charts and a latitude La Salle had misjudged in 1682. For months he tried to believe it was an outlet of his river.

Which object, raised by divers in 1995, proved that a wreck off Texas was Robert de La Salle's ship La Belle?

A bronze cannon carried the crests of the French king and of an admiral who died in 1683. Its serial number was later matched to a French list of guns loaded aboard La Belle.

Which powerful confederacy's raids into the Illinois country kept threatening Robert de La Salle's forts and allies?

Iroquois war parties were pushing west in search of beaver hunting grounds. La Salle spent years urging the Miami and Illinois nations to unite against them and settle near his forts.

Which river was Robert de La Salle long credited with discovering in 1669, though he never made that claim himself?

The Ohio story rests on two accounts written by his backers in France. Historians find no evidence he reached it, and his own journal of the trip was lost in 1756.

Henri de Tonti's 1686 trading post, founded while seeking Robert de La Salle, made him the 'Father' of which state?

Arkansas Post began with a few Frenchmen left to trade with the Quapaw. Tonti had come downriver hoping to meet La Salle on his way upriver, unaware that he was stranded in Texas.

Robert de La Salle's ship Le Griffon vanished in 1679 after leaving which Great Lakes bay with a load of furs?

Green Bay was the last place Le Griffon was seen, sailing off with a crew of six. Wreck hunters have announced her discovery many times, but none of the finds has been confirmed.

Hundreds of thousands of which small trade items were found in the wreck of Robert de La Salle's ship La Belle?

Glass beads in blue, white and black lay in the hold beside brass rings, hawk bells and axe heads. La Belle carried whatever was thought necessary to start a colony from nothing.

Men on Robert de La Salle's 1685 expedition along the Texas coast died after eating which wild food?

Prickly pear killed a number of the party, among them the captain of La Belle. His replacement died in a raid soon after, and the ship was left to a mate who later ran her aground.

What colour was the gold-trimmed coat Robert de La Salle wore to claim Louisiana for France in April 1682?

Scarlet trimmed with gold set the tone for a ceremony of hymns, musket volleys and a buried copper plate. The cloak outlasted every shipwreck and was still with him when he died.

Which priest on Robert de La Salle's 1679 voyage gave his name to the Minnesota county that contains Minneapolis?

Louis Hennepin was sent ahead by La Salle in 1680 and carried off by a Sioux war party. His books made him famous in Europe, though many historians have called him a falsifier.

Alphonse de Tonti, younger brother of Robert de La Salle's lieutenant Henri, helped found which American city in 1701?

Detroit began as Fort Pontchartrain, which Alphonse later commanded. The brothers' father was a banker credited with inventing the tontine, an early form of life insurance.

Fort Frontenac, the fur-trade base Robert de La Salle was granted in 1675, stood on the site of which Ontario city?

Kingston grew up around the fort, which La Salle rebuilt in stone. The crossing beside the old site is still called the La Salle Causeway.

Which of the Great Lakes did Robert de La Salle's ship Le Griffon cross first on its maiden voyage in August 1679?

Erie had never carried a ship so large. Le Griffon then sailed on through Huron and into Michigan, uncharted waters that only canoes had explored before.

Fort Prudhomme, built by Robert de La Salle in 1682 while hunting for a lost gunsmith, stood near which modern city?

Memphis lies near the bluffs where the party waited about ten days. The missing man, Pierre Prudhomme, turned up starving, and the stockade was named after him.

Who were the only people spared in the 1688 raid that destroyed Robert de La Salle's settlement on the Texas coast?

Several children of the Talon family were carried off and raised by the raiders. Spanish expeditions later recovered them, and two of the boys eventually went back to France.

To excavate Robert de La Salle's ship La Belle in 1996, Texas archaeologists pumped the bay dry inside which structure?

A cofferdam of double steel walls packed with sand let the team dig as if on land. It was the first time a shipwreck in North America had been excavated in the dry.

Which US Secretary of State accepted France's claim to own La Belle, the wrecked ship of Robert de La Salle?

Madeleine Albright conceded the point because La Belle was a royal vessel only lent to La Salle. A 2003 agreement left the wreck French property, looked after by Texas.

Petit-Goâve, where Robert de La Salle lay delirious with fever on his 1684 voyage, is in which modern country?

Haiti was then the French colony of Saint-Domingue. While the fleet waited there, Spanish privateers captured the ketch that carried most of the expedition's tools and provisions.

Captain Beaujeu, who sailed Robert de La Salle to Texas, compared their goal to finding which legendary object?

The philosopher's stone was his gloomy comparison in a letter of August 1684. He added that he was sailing late in the season, overloaded, and with an irritable man.

Fort Crèvecoeur, which Robert de La Salle built in 1680 as the first French fort in Illinois, stood near which city?

Peoria counts Henri de Tonti as a founder, because he moved the region's main French post there about ten years after the first fort was abandoned.

Robert de La Salle and Henri de Tonti built Fort Saint-Louis in 1682–83 atop which Illinois River landmark?

Starved Rock is a sandstone butte the French simply called Le Rocher. The fort on top was meant to gather allied nations under its protection, and the site is now an Illinois state park.

Which school's nautical archaeologists conserved the hull of Robert de La Salle's ship La Belle after its recovery?

Texas A&M University rebuilt the timbers in a purpose-built cradle and vat. The wood was soaked in polyethylene glycol and then freeze-dried, a treatment that took over ten years.

In 1996, ranch workers pinpointed the long-lost site of Robert de La Salle's Texas fort by searching with what?

Metal detectors led them to eight cast-iron guns that Spanish soldiers had buried in 1689. Historians had been arguing over where the fort stood since the early 1900s.

Which Gulf Coast people, hostile since the first weeks, destroyed Robert de La Salle's Texas settlement?

Karankawa anger dated from the landing, when French soldiers took canoes and pelts from a deserted village. The final attack on the fort came around Christmas 1688.

From which French Atlantic port did Robert de La Salle sail in July 1684, bound for the Gulf of Mexico?

La Rochelle saw the convoy off on 24 July 1684 with about 300 people aboard. A snapped bowsprit on the warship Joly sent it back to shore within two days.

Which religious order, which counted Robert de La Salle's brother Jean as a priest, gave him land near Montreal?

Sulpicians handed him the fief for nothing soon after he arrived. He sold most of it back to them in 1669 to pay for his first expedition.

Robert de La Salle's 1679 portage from the St. Joseph River to the Kankakee crossed the site of which Indiana city?

South Bend marks the short carry that linked the Great Lakes to the Mississippi river system. A sculpture of La Salle now looks out from the Rockne Memorial at Notre Dame.

Whose journal is the principal eyewitness account of Robert de La Salle's last expedition to the Texas coast?

Henri Joutel commanded the fort whenever La Salle was away and later led a handful of men overland to Canada. His journal sailed back to the Gulf with the next French expedition.

Which 1819 agreement ended the American claim to Texas that rested on Robert de La Salle's short-lived colony?

The Adams-Onís Treaty gave Florida to the United States, which in return dropped its claim to Texas. The border between them was fixed at the Sabine River.