FROM LA SALLE TO DE TONTI

Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle was the younger son of a nobleman, a native of Rouen, France, born November 21, 1643. He entered the Jesuit order, but disliked the discipline and left the order in 1665. He followed his brother, a Sulpician priest, to Montreal in 1667. He received a seigneury from the Sulpicians and became a pioneer farmer for two years. But La Salle desired wealth and adventure. The farm life in Canada was not to his liking. So he sold his seigneury in 1669 and began exploring north of Lake Ontario and in the Niagara region.

In 1672, Louis de Baude, Count de Frontenac, became governor of New France. He received help from La Salle by means of maps, descriptions, etc., and La Salle located the site for Fort Frontenac, now Kingston, Ontario in 1673. About this time, Father Marquette and Joliet had returned and excited La Salle with the story of the Mississippi.

Frontenac, now indebted to La Salle, advised him to return to Paris to obtain financial help and the consent of King Louis XIV. He went in early 1674. But Louis was having his own troubles in Europe. But he allowed La Salle to drum up financial support in France. He also gave La Salle a seigneury near Fort Frontenac, providing La Salle rebuilt the fort destroyed by the Iroquois, and maintained it at his own expense. To do so, Louis gave La Salle permission to pursue the lucrative fur trade. If he did so, he would receive a title of nobility. In 1675, La Salle returned to Canada and in three years accomplished all he set out to do, and received the title of nobility he desired.

In 1678, he went back to France to drum up more support and to obtain permission to pursue the explorations of Father Marquette and Joliet. He was successful on both accounts and on May 12, 1678, he received letters patent from Louis XIV to continue the explorations of Father Marquette and Joliet, find a port on the Gulf of Mexico, explore the lands southwest of the Great Lakes and find a way to get into Mexico.

While in Paris, La Salle met Henri de Tonti, son of an Italian refugee in the service of France. De Tonti made a good impression and La Salle liked him. La Salle persuaded him to become his second in command and return with him to Canada. De Tonti was a strong personality. In the Sicilian Wars he had lost his right hand and wore a metal hand covered with a glove. He was known when aroused to use this metal hand on those who displeased him. As La Salle’s lieutenant, he was not afraid to use this hand effectively to quell disorderly Indians. He became known and feared among the Indians as the man with an iron hand.

La Salle returned to Fort Frontenac in July, 1678, and began his preparations. At the foot of Lake Erie near the site of Buffalo, he had De Tonti build a small sailing ship named Le Griffon to carry furs back from Green Bay. The ship went to Green Bay in the spring of 1679, loaded up with furs and headed back for Buffalo on September 18. That same summer, La Salle and his party of some thirty men followed in reverse the route Father Marquette and Joliet had taken six years before in the return from the lower Mississippi, going up Lake Michigan to the mouth of the St. Joseph River, over the portage to the Kankakee River, down the Kankakee to the Illinois, then down the Illinois River. In January, 1680, he built Fort Crevecoeur, near the site of Peoria, Illinois. While there, he received word that Le Griffon had been lost. Realizing that he had to get back to Fort Frontenac fast to retrieve a bad financial situation, he aborted this first expedition on March 2, 1680. La Salle and five men hurried back to Fort Frontenac. De Tonti was left in command of Fort Crevecoeur. La Salle and his companions made an almost 1,000 mile journey, mostly on foot, in 65 days arriving at Fort Frontenac on May 6. He spent the summer of 1680 straightening out his finances and obtaining additional funds.