Sieur de La Salle

René-Robert Cavelier was born at Rouen in 1643 and spent nine years as a Jesuit novice before walking out of the order in 1667 — the Dictionary of Canadian Biography calls him “inquietus,” restless, and the word fits like a glove. He crossed to New France that same year with dreams too big for the colony: a water route through the continent to China.

In 1673 he helped plant the French post at Cataracoui on Lake Ontario; the next year he sailed to France, talked the court into granting him the whole seigneury, and renamed it Fort Frontenac. In 1679 he built the Griffon on the Niagara — a 45-ton, seven-cannon barque named for Frontenac's coat of arms, and the first full-sized sailing ship on the upper Great Lakes. She vanished on her maiden return voyage with a load of furs.

In 1682 he paddled the Mississippi to its mouth and claimed the whole basin for Louis XIV — Louisiana. Then the disaster: a 1684 expedition missed the Mississippi entirely and landed in Texas, and on March 19, 1687, near present-day Navasota, his own mutinous men shot him dead. The restless man found the one horizon he couldn't cross.

La Salle left Montreal in early July 1669 with a small party and two Sulpician missionaries — François Dollier de Casson and René de Bréhan de Galinée — who wanted converts while La Salle wanted the Ohio. His stated goal, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography records, was to discover the Ohio River "in order not to leave to another the honour of finding the way to the Southern Sea, and thereby the route to China." They crossed Lake Ontario, tangled with Seneca diplomacy for a month, hired a Dutch interpreter who barely spoke French, and reached the far end of Burlington Bay — right about here — where La Salle collapsed with fever. (Galinée slyly notes some said it was the fright of three rattlesnakes.) On September 24 they pushed inland to Tinaouataoua, where they unexpectedly met Adrien Jolliet, fresh from the Great Lakes. A week later, on October 1, La Salle pleaded illness and parted from the missionaries, supposedly to return to Montreal. He vanished into the bush instead, resurfacing only in the summer of 1670. Later he claimed that in those lost months he'd found the Ohio — even the Mississippi. Here's the honest part: the evidence is thin. The claim rests on two suspect later documents, and La Salle's own 1680 letter shows him still asking basic questions about the Mississippi. The DCB's verdict is blunt: the only plausible explanation is that he found neither river.

Dollier de Casson got the last word after all: he wrote the first history of Montreal, covering 1640–1672 — but nobody read it for nearly two centuries. The manuscript sat in a Paris archive until it was found in 1844 and finally published in 1868.

Read the 1928 marker closely and you'll notice it hedges: La Salle is "believed to have been the first white man to set foot on these shores." Believed. That single word carries the whole weight of the claim — because it was never provable. No 1669 document plants a flag here; the "first" is a 1928-era inference from an absence of earlier paperwork, and absence of evidence isn't evidence. Meanwhile, people had been living here for a very long time. This was the homeland of the Attawandaron — the Neutral Confederacy — some 40,000 people between Lakes Ontario and Erie, the largest community in the region, destroyed by wars, diseases and famine by 1650, nearly two decades before La Salle's canoes appeared. So could La Salle have been the first European on this particular shore? Possibly. But "first white man" is tradition, not settled fact — and the stone knew what it was doing with that word "believed." The Attawandaron, had anyone thought to ask in 1928, might have had thoughts.

The stone marker's full inscription reads: "Erected to commemorate the landing near this spot September 1669 of Sieur de la Salle French explorer believed to have been the first white man to set foot on these shores. Erected 1928 by Wentworth Historical Society." So a 1669 landing got its monument 259 years later — which tells you more about 1928 than about 1669. The timing isn't an accident: La Salle Park had only just been renamed for the explorer in 1923 — before that it was Wabasso Park — so the marker rode a wave of local La Salle enthusiasm. The 1917 pavilion, the pleasure-boat crowds, the picnic grounds: this was the west end's playground, and a founding-father boulder was exactly the fashion. The 1920s were the great decade of the commemorative boulder, when local history societies across the province were chiseling their favourite explorers into stone. The Wentworth Historical Society was simply doing what everyone did. Two and a half centuries after the fact, certainty is easy — especially when you get to carve it in granite.