The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions

The Adventures of the Chevalier de La Salle and His Companions is a popular biography by John Stevens Cabot Abbott of the seventeenth-century French explorer Robert de La Salle (1643-1687). La Salle was one of the major figures of French exploration in North America and the first European to descend the Mississippi River to its mouth, claiming the entire river basin for France and naming the territory Louisiana in honor of Louis XIV.

La Salle was born in Rouen and was educated by the Jesuits before sailing to New France in 1666. He spent the following two decades in various exploratory and commercial ventures across the Great Lakes and Mississippi regions, establishing French posts and trading networks while pushing the boundaries of European knowledge of the North American interior. His major expedition descended the Mississippi from the Illinois country to the Gulf of Mexico in 1682. He returned to France for support and was authorized to establish a French colony at the mouth of the river. The colonization expedition of 1684 missed the Mississippi delta, landed instead in Texas, and collapsed across the following three years. La Salle was murdered by his own mutinous men in 1687 in what is now east Texas.

Abbott handles the story in the popular biographical mode of his period. La Salle is presented as a heroic figure of French exploration whose persistence and vision opened the North American interior to European awareness. The treatment of the indigenous peoples La Salle encountered reflects mid-nineteenth-century American assumptions and is uncomfortable for modern readers in various ways, though Abbott records the actual interactions with reasonable accuracy.

The book draws on the major French primary sources for La Salle’s career including the various accounts by his contemporaries Henri Joutel, Henri de Tonti, and others who had accompanied him on the various expeditions. Francis Parkman’s substantial scholarly work on La Salle, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West of 1869, became the standard English-language account a few years after Abbott’s biography and supplemented the popular treatment with serious scholarship.

The book runs about three hundred pages. It pairs with Parkman’s La Salle and with the broader French colonial American history literature.