Reviews of Books

The Wreck of the Belle, the Ruin of La Salle. By ROBERT S. WEDDLE. Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, Texas A & M University. (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2001. Pp. xviii, 327. $29.95.)

The trans-Mississippi South is little known to early American historians, who generally stay close to the Atlantic coast in their accounts of European settlement in North America. Far from the principal English colonies east of the Appalachians and the Spanish in Mexico to the south, the region was inhabited and visited by few Europeans, chiefly French and Spanish, until the mid-eighteenth century. Within its borders lived a variety of native peoples, including the Caddo, who had occupied the lands around the Red River in present-day Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma since at least 800 A.D. Organized into complex city-states under strong chiefdoms and thriving on the cultivation of maize and the hunting of deer, the Caddo grew in numbers and power until the fourteenth century, when severe drought shattered their agricultural base. Caddo groups dispersed into smaller centers between the Red and Sabine Rivers, where they responded to the arrival of Europeans by seizing on opportunities for trade. One such newcomer was the French adventurer René Robert Cavelier, better known as the Sieur de La Salle ( 1643–1687 ), whose grand schemes to establish a trading empire for Louis XIV in the Lower Mississippi Valley shattered in 1687 in an ill-fated effort to plant a settlement along the Gulf Coast in East Texas. Forced to abandon that outpost for lack of supplies, La Salle paid the ultimate price for his ambitions: he was murdered by his disillusioned men somewhere in East Texas. Yet his colonial dreams lived on in the French communities that took hold in the region during the eighteenth century and whose presence would dramatically alter the way of life of the long-established Caddo.

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