Show Notes
It is time to get back to New France and the exploration of the middle of this beautiful country of ours. Our vehicle will René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, known to both his contemporaries and to history as “La Salle.” You’ve heard his name, especially if you live within driving distance of the Mississippi, but do you know what he actually did? This and the next few episodes tell La Salle’s remarkable story.
We are back in New France, along the St. Lawrence River, now in the 1660s. The episode begins with an introduction to the geopolitics of North America from the French perspective, then pivots to La Salle’s early life and first years in New France, where he had received a grant of land on roughly the site of Montreal’s international airport. Finally, we conclude with his first journey of discovery, an attempt – perhaps fulfilled – to discover the Ohio River, of which he had heard from Seneca Iroquois who wintered with him in 1668-69. This voyage mattered, because it might have established French claims to the Pittsburgh area, the ambiguity of which was, along with George Washington, the catalyst for the French and Indian War. Sadly, those claims were ambiguous because the French national archives had misplaced the relevant narratives, and they only resurfaced in the 19th century. Archivists matter!
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Primary references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)
Anka Muhlstein, La Salle: Explorer of the North American Frontier
Robert S. Weddle, “Tarnished Hero: A La Salle Overview,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Oct. 2009.
Richard Gross, “La Salle’s Claim and the Ohio River Valley,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, Spring 2020.
More from The History of the Americans
This factoid-rich episode is a major rewriting of one of the earliest and most popular episodes of the podcast, Introduction to the Columbian Exchange, which originally aired on February 12, 2021 and then again in a revised form as episode #166 on October 11, 2024. This version includes lots of new aspects of the Columbian Exchange, and more recent scholarship on several of the topics discussed in the old episodes.
It is the 1670s. Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, having returned from exploring south of Lake Erie, made common cause with the flamboyant and visionary new governor of New France, Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac. Together they hatch a plan to get permission from Louis XIV to build a string of forts in the Great Lakes region and explore and settle the Mississippi River Valley. La Salle travels to France twice, and enlists the King’s first minister, the great Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to support a mission to find the mouth of the Mississippi so that France might establish a base there for the purpose of better harrassing Spain. Along the way La Salle builds a huge fort at the eastern end of Lake … Ontario, survives the second of five assassination attempts, and Frontenac demonstrates a great flair for diplomacy with the Iroquois.
It is the spring of 1681. The “exclusion crisis,” an insurgency in Parliament proposing to exclude the king’s brother, James, Duke of York, from the line of succession, was reaching its climax. Even so, on March 4 King Charles II found time to grant William Penn a vast territory extending from the west bank of the Delaware River to a longitude equal to the then western border of Maryland. It was now William Penn’s role, as sole proprietor of Pennsylvania, to fill it up with people. He would do a remarkable job, especially under the challenging circumstances, relying heavily on his … pen. Along the way he would write a practical and moral defense of English colonialism at a time when many of the movers and shakers in London were arguing against it.
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William Penn returned from Ireland in August 1670, and soon found himself arrested, along with fellow Quaker William Mead, for preaching to a crowd in public in violation of “the common law,” an ambiguity that would play out during their momentous trial. The trial would end in their acquittal, notwithstanding egregious intimidation of the jury by the judge, the Lord Mayor Sir Samuel Starling. Among other exciting moments, Starling threw the principled foreman of the jury, Edward Bushel, in jail. Bushel’s suit for a writ of habeas corpus would lead to a verdict that established an inviolate principle in Anglo-American law, that judges may not intimidate juries.