144 Marcel Moraud
Spanish and French exploration in North America,” and yet
he does not—in spirit at least—belong to the seventeenth
century. To understand him we have to go back to the days
of the Renaissance, days of physical and intellectual expan-
sion, of untiring energy, and of bold enterprise, days of great
expectations, boundless dreams, at a time when to dream
was to act.
Having come to America in 1667 “with the purpose
of making some discovery,” by the ninth of April, 1682,
when he was only thirty-eight, Cavelier de La Salle had
completed the discovery of the huge and then mysterious
river of the Mississippi. He had taken formal possession, in
the name of the King of France, of the vast country, which
he called Louisiana, with its “seas, harbors, ports, bays . . .
and all its nations, peoples, provinces, cities, towns, villages
and rivers . . . from the mouth of the great river Saint Louis,
otherwise called Ohio, as also along the river Colbert or
Mississippi and its affluents . . . as far as its mouth at the
sea or Gulf of Mexico and also to the mouth of the river of
the Palms.” By so doing de La SaIle had added to the crown
of Louis XIV and to the already explored portions of this
continent a tremendous domain, a huge empire comprising,
in the words of de La Salle’s great historian and admirer,
Parkman, “the fertile plains of Texas, the vast basin of the
Mississippi, from its frozen northern springs to the sultry
borders of the Gulf, . . . a region of savanna and forests, sun
cracked deserts and grassy prairies, watered by a thousand
rivers, ranged by a thousand warlike tribes.’
Had de La Salle never accomplished anything else, his
name would nevertheless survive among those of the great
explorers of this continent. But with tireless energy, spurred
on by success and never daunted by reverse, de La Salle
went back to Canada and then to France where we find him