The name is absent

Cavelier de La Salle, 1684-1687   159

As Iate as 1844, however, he was not fully known either
in the United States or in France. The town of Rouen, which
is so proud of him today, did not suspect that it could
claim him as a distinguished son. But about the middle of
the nineteenth century great interest developed in the United
States, in England, and in France, in the life and explora-
tions of Cavelier de La Salle. A keen competition started
which is still going on today, each nation generously bring-
ing its contribution to the intangible but undying monument
which has been erected to de La Salle by American, English
and French scholars, among whom are Falconer in England,
Jared Sparks, at one time President of Harvard University,
French, Gilmary Shea, Parkman in the United States—
Gravier, Margry, Guénin, Chesnel, de Villiers, de la Roncière
in France. With a grant of the American Congress a mag-
nificent collection gathered in France with infinite pains and
great scholarship by Margry was published in 1878. It con-
tains some of the most valuable documents on de La Salle’s
last expedition, including some of his family papers. Strangely
enough these were not discovered by a scholar but by a man-
servant, who with a discretion not unusual in his calling
spent his evenings reading the family papers of his master
and having found them of some interest called his attention
to them. To the above names we must add those of the
standard historians of Texas, whose studies I need not men-
tion here, as they are well known to you, and also a group
of Texas scholars led by Professor Bolton, who in the last
thirty years have brought out many valuable documents
from Spanish and Mexican archives, and given a new impulse
to the de La Salle studies on this continent.

Having followed the fate of de La Salle’s expedition
through its inception, its first stage, and then through two
hundred and fifty years of history, we will now try to see,

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