Mouth of the Mississippi - La Salle Claims Louisiana
1682On April 9, 1682, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, reached the mouth of the Mississippi River — the first European to descend the river from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. With about 30 Frenchmen and Native allies, he stood on the delta and performed a ceremony of possession: erected a wooden cross and a column bearing the arms of Louis XIV, fired muskets, and read a proclamation claiming for France the entire territory drained by the Mississippi and its tributaries. He named it Louisiane. The claim covered roughly a third of the present-day United States — from the Appalachians to the Rockies, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. La Salle then sailed back to France to convince Louis XIV to back a colony at this spot. The expedition he led from France in 1684 missed the river by 400 miles and landed instead in Texas, at Matagorda Bay — beginning the doomed Fort St. Louis venture that would cost him his life. The Louisiana name and the French claim survived him, surfacing again as the Louisiana Purchase 121 years later.
