René-Rohert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, is remembered principally for being the first European to traverse the entire course of the Mississippi River, a feat he accomplished in 1682. Two years later, he set sail from France in quest of the mouth of the Mississippi where he hoped to establish a French settlement. Lamentably, he never found the Mississippi again, his settlement near Matagorda Bay proved ill fated, and he himself was murdered by dissident fellow travelers in 1687.
The response to the La Salle expeditions was dramatic. It helped shift French interest from a purely Canadian emphasis, to one encompassing the whole of interior North America. It also drew the attention of the Spanish, who viewed the French as interlopers, and sent several expeditions in search of La Salle’s lost colony.
The present volume represents the combined talents of historians Robert Weddle and Patricia Galloway and the linguistic abilities of Ann Bell, among others. It presents two primary documents, never before published in their entirety, and a third only recently translated.
The first document, the Minet Relation/Journal, recently acquired by the Public Archives of Canada from a private collector, consists of a small volume of 140 pages, the first part of which contains a history of the 1682 expedition as described to Minet by two participants, while the second is Minet’s diary of the 1684-85 expedition. This diary provides only the second detailed description of that expedition, and is far more critical of La Salle than that of Henri Joutel.
The second document is a diary of the “Voyage of the Piraguas” kept by a Spanish pilot, Juan Enríquez Barroto. Recently rediscovered in the Biblioteca del Real Palacio in Madrid, it describes the circumnavigation of the gulf coast by Barroto and crews in two shallow draft boats in 1686-87. Barroto was able to report to the viceroy that La Salle’s settlement had been entirely destroyed. His observations and superb coastal maps prompted many more explorations, and led to a renewal of Spanish interest in gulf coast exploration.
The third, and perhaps most interesting, document is entitled the “Talon Interrogations,” and consists of testimony given by two brothers, Pierre and Jean-Baptiste Talon, to French officials in 1698. The two, as children, had been on the 1684-85 expedition, and witnessed the murder of La Salle and the destruction of the settlement. They found their way back to France after living with the coastal Indians, being rescued by the Spanish, living briefly with the viceroy, and then serving in the Spanish navy. In this latter period, they were captured by the French and repatriated to France, in time to give testimony and sail on Iberville’s third expedition. Their testimony provides the only eyewitness account of the Ft. Saint Louis massacre; a second and different version of La Salle’s murder; and a wealth of ethnological, natural history, and linguistic data.
In sum, these three documents, translated, carefully edited, and placed in their appropriate historical context, shed considerable light and some new knowledge on La Salle’s expeditions. Their publication could prompt renewed research on seventeenth-century gulf coast history.
