Description

René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, was a 17th-century French explorer and fur trader in North America. He explored the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada, and the Mississippi River. He is best known for an early 1682 expedition in which he canoed the lower Mississippi River from the mouth of the Illinois River to the Gulf of Mexico; there, on April 9, 1682, he claimed the Mississippi River basin for France after giving it the name La Louisiane, in honor of Saint Louis and Louis XIV. One source states that "he acquired for France the most fertile half of the North American continent". A later, ill-fated expedition in 1687 to the Gulf coast of Mexico gave the United States a putative claim to Texas in the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803; La Salle was assassinated during that expedition.