Robert la salle mini biography george michael

Prior to Rene-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle’s expedition of , the rulers of England, France, and Spain gave little thought to the role that the Lower Mississippi Valley might play in their imperial designs. Several groups of Spaniards and Frenchmen explored the western interior and Gulf Coast of North America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though the European powers made only moderate investments in establishing permanent colonies until the eighteenth century. European exploration of the region that La Salle would name “Louisiana,” therefore, remained tangential to entanglements in places like Mexico, Canada, New England, and the West Indies, where Spanish, French, and British colonizing efforts clashed. Nonetheless, the early exploration of colonial Louisiana proved crucial to the fates of those European empires, as well as to the frontier encounters between people of European, Native American, and African descent.

Spanish Exploration in the Gulf of Mexico

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