| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Wreck of the Belle, the Ruin of La Salle. By Robert S. Weddle. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001. xviii, 327 pp. $29.95, ISBN 1-58544-121-X.)

This awkwardly titled book is yet another biography of Robert Cavelier de La Salle rather than an account of the discovery, excavation, and preservation of the French explorer's vessel, La Belle, and its contents, which archaeologists of the Texas Historical Commission located in 1995 in Matagorda Bay along the Texas coast. Robert S. Weddle, widely regarded as the dean of Texas colonial historians, has organized his material into three parts of four or five chapters each. They center on La Salle's life as an explorer around the Great Lakes and the Illinois and Mississippi River basins, his expedition to the Gulf of Mexico, and the ensuing tragedy in Texas. Weddle's emphasis on the last four years of La Salle's life reverses the weight found in earlier biographies and establishes the historical context for additional volumes that the Texas Historical Commission may sponsor or publish about the discovery of the oldest French shipwreck in America. . . .

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