March 19, 1687

Work moves fast, every email, report, and proposal counts.

That's where Grammarly comes in.

It's your one place to think, write, and finish.

Grammarly's AI agents help you find natural phrasing,

fine-tuned tone, and confidently write wherever you work.

It's the premier writing tool that 93% of users trust to get more work done.

In a world of generic AI, don't sound like everyone else.

With Grammarly, you never will.

Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com.

Ease, Texas, March 19th, 1687.

The man who gave France half a continent

walked into a stand of tall grass and never walked out again.

Renee Robert Cavalier, Sûre de la Salle,

had spent the better part of two decades carving his name

across the map of North America.

Born in 1643 to a wealthy merchant family in Rouen,

he had abandoned a path toward the Jesuit priesthood at 22,

finding the contemplative life unsuited to a man whose blood ran hot with ambition.

He sailed for New France nearly penniless,

having surrendered his inheritance upon taking his initial vows

and landed on the island of Montreal in 1667 with nothing but nerve

and an appetite for unmapped country.

Within a few years, La Salle was ranging through the Great Lakes wilderness,

trading furs, building forts, and dreaming bigger than any Frenchman before him.

He befriended the Count de Frontenac, the fighting governor of New France,

and together they extended French military power westward,

establishing Fort Frontenac on Lake Ontario and holding the Iroquois in check.

La Salle prospered, he controlled a lion's share of the fur trade,

but prosperity bored him.

Word of a mighty river the Indians called Messissippi

drew him like a compass needle swinging north.

In February 1682, La Salle and a party of some forty Europeans and Native Americans

pushed canoes into the icy current of the Messissippi and started south.

They passed the mouth of the Missouri, built a small fort near present-day Memphis

and negotiated their way through the territory of the Arkansas tribe.

On April 9th, 1682, the expedition reached the Gulf of Mexico.

La Salle planted a cross, hoisted the bourbon banner,

and in the name of King Louis XIV claimed the entire Messissippi river basin for France.

He called it Louisiana.

One stroke of imperial theater and France held the most fertile half of North America.

The sun king smiled upon his explorer.

In 1684, Louis XIV approved La Salle's plan to return by sea

and establish a permanent colony at the mouth of the Great River.

Four ships and several hundred colonists, soldiers, and priests sailed from France in July.

The expedition was cursed from the start.

One ship was captured by Spanish pirates in the Caribbean.

La Salle quarreled savagely with Bojo, the naval commander.

And when they reached the Gulf Coast, La Salle overshot the Messissippi delta by hundreds of miles,

mistaking Madaguarda Bay on the Texas coast for his destination.

They landed in February 1685.

The store ship Amable Wrecked trying to enter the Bay.

Caron Cawa Indians pillaged the cargo that washed up on the beach.

Bojo, disgusted, sailed back to France with the bad news.

La Salle built Fort St. Louis on a bluff above Garcitas Creek

and set about the grim business of survival.

Survival proved elusive.

The Texas coastal plain was a furnace in summer and a swamp in the rains.

Disease thinned the ranks steadily.

Rattlesnake bites killed some, including one man whose gangrenous leg,

the surgeon Leotot amputated,

in what may have been the first such surgery performed in Texas.

The patient died anyway.

Caron Cawa raiding parties picked off stragglers.

Deserters slipped into the wilderness,

preferring their chances among the Indians

to another day under La Salle's iron command.

The remaining ship, La Belle, sank in Madaguarda Bay,

taking with it their last means of escape.

By early 1687, the colony of several hundred souls

had been whittled to fewer than forty starving, desperate people.

They were stranded on the wrong coast.

Hundreds of miles from the river La Salle had promised them,

with no ships, no supplies, and no rescue coming.

La Salle made the only decision left to him.

He would lead a party overland,

marched northeast across Texas to find the Mississippi,

follow it north to the French settlements in Illinois,

and bring back help.

In January 1687, he set out with sixteen men,

leaving twenty souls behind at the fort.

Among his company walked his nephew, Crivelle de Moranje,

his loyal Shawnee Hunter Nica, his servant Saje,

the faithful lieutenant on Rijutel,

the recollect friar Anastase Duet,

and a handful of men whose loyalty was already rotten.

Pierre Duet, a merchant son who had lost a fortune,

bank-rolling La Salle's disasters,

the surgeon Liotto, a brooding man with a grudge,

a German buccaneer, the French called Yens,

sometimes known as English Jim,

and Jean-Larshevec, Duet's young lackey.

Two and a half months on the trail,

ground down whatever deference remained,

La Salle was, by all accounts, a terrible leader of men,

brilliant, tireless, and utterly without the gift of diplomacy.

Even the devoted Jutel called him too haughty,

noting a rigidness toward those under his command

that drew on him implacable hatred.

Moranje, his nephew, was worse,

hot tempered, imperious,

and given to fits of rage directed at the very men

who kept him alive.

On March 17th, Nica shot two buffalo.

La Salle sent Moranje, Saje,

and a few others to the hunting camp,

where Duet's group was drying the meat.

By woodland custom, the hunters had set aside

the marrow bones and choice cuts for themselves.

Moranje arrived and flew into one of his famous rages.

He seized the whole of the meat,

including the reserved portions,

and threatened Duet Ho.

It was a small thing, a quarrel over marrow bones.

But it was the spark that found the powder.

That night Duet held a quiet council

with Lioto, Hien's, Larshevec,

and a man named Tacie.

The decision was unanimous.

Moranje would die,

and Nica and Saje with him,

because they were La Salle's men

and could not be trusted to keep silent.

When the watch changed,

and most of the camps slept,

the surgeon Lioto picked up an axe.

He crept to where the three men lay

and split their skulls open, one after another.

Moranje struck first,

lurched into a sitting position,

gasping and spasming but unable to speak.

The conspirators forced Demarl,

a pilot who had not been part of the plot,

to finish Moranje off,

binding him to the conspiracy through blood.

Now vengeance and self-preservation

demanded the death of the one man

who would surely destroy them all.

La Salle had to die.

Six miles away,

La Salle waited at his own camp.

His nephew and the others had been expected the night before.

By the morning of March 19th,

his anxiety had turned to dread.

He set out with father Duet

and the other Shawnee guide

to find Moranje.

As they neared the hunting camp,

La Salle fired his pistol

to summon anyone within earshot.

The shot announced his approach

to the men who were waiting for him.

Duho and Lioto,

crouched in the tall river Cain along the bank,

muskets primed.

La Salle stood in the open

on the far side of the stream,

positioned as bait.

When La Salle spotted him,

he called out and asked where Moranje was.

La Salle answered without removing his hat,

his voice agitated,

insolent.

Moranje was strolling about somewhere,

he said.

La Salle advanced to rebuke the young man

for his disrespect.

La Salle drew back,

pulling La Salle toward the screen of Cain

where the killers lay.

A shot cracked from the grass.

Then another,

a ball struck La Salle in the head.

He dropped where he stood and died

without a word.

The surgeon, Lioto, stood over the body

and mocked the dead man.

Word was, he called him,

grand bashal and laughed.

The conspirators stripped La Salle naked,

dragged the corpse into the brush

and left it for the buzzards and the wolves.

No burial, no cross, no prayer.

The man who had claimed a continent

for France,

rotted in an unmarked thicket

somewhere in the Texas wilderness,

his exact resting place unknown to this day.

The story did not end cleanly.

Within weeks, the murderers turned on each other

among the Hassanai Indians.

Hayens shot Duhau through the heart

with a pistol,

Duhau died unshriven,

unable to utter the names of Jesus and Mary.

He ends his companion,

Router, shot Lioto.

The surgeon was slow to die

and the details of his end were ugly enough

that Jutel spared his journal,

the particulars.

A handful of survivors,

including Jutel and Father Duhau,

eventually made their way north

through hundreds of miles of wilderness

to French settlements on the Mississippi.

Back at Madaguardia Bay,

the 20 colonists left behind

fared no better.

By December 1688,

the Karen Kawa killed the remaining adults

and took five children captive.

Fort St. Louis was ashes.

La Salle had dreamed of empire.

He had paddled the length of the Mississippi,

planted the Fleur de Lille at the edge of the known world,

and handed his king a territory,

stretching from the great lakes

to the Gulf of Mexico.

He died for it in a patch of river cane,

murdered by men he had led into the wilderness,

and could not lead back out.

Dark History Today is a personal service

of true crime historian.