BARBIER INFANT. In the fall of 1688 a child was born to Gabriel Minime, Sieur de Barbier,^qv and his wife in the Texas colony founded almost four years previously by René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle.^qv This infant, of whom neither the given name nor the sex is known, was the first child of record born in Texas of European parents and the offspring of the first recorded European marriage there. Like Virginia Dare of the Roanoke colony, the first English child born in America, the infant Barbier suffered an early and cruel fate. Three months old when Karankawa Indians destroyed the French settlement of Fort Saint-Louis, the infant and its mother, like the Talon children, were spared by the native women and taken to their village. When the Indian men returned from the massacre, however, they first killed Madame Barbier, then her babe, "which one of them dashed against a tree while holding it by a foot."

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Robert S. Weddle, "La Salle's Survivors," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 75 (April 1972). Robert S. Weddle et al., eds., La Salle, the Mississippi, and the Gulf: Three Primary Documents (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987).